Kiosk Mode

[rac146]

Describe the feature

Currently to get a full kiosk experience, a third party application is required such as Fully Kiosk. Would be pretty awesome to get more of this functionality built into the native app, as a kiosk use case is pretty popular for HASS users.

A few examples features that would help:

• always on
• load companion app on boot
• screensaver integration
• a way to control tablet screen on/off through HASS

Use cases

Kiosk Mode for home assistant so users can access HASS from an always-on tablet

Examples

No response

Anything else?

No response

[mib1185]

The newest blog post about the Android companion app mentions:

You can now set the Home Assistant app as your device’s default launcher, which is great for wall panel setups.

So you could try to set the HA Android app as the default launcher of your device

EDIT:
You need to enable it first under Settings > Companion App > Launcher then you can select the HA android app as default launcher.
this video shows how to do this.

[rac146]

I will definitely give this a try! I'll refine my post after experimenting. The goal would be to replace Fully Kiosk completely.

[rac146]

I gave this a try - while having HASS Companion as the default launcher is a good step in the right direction, it still needs a bit of refining.

These are just my observations with a Samsung Android tablet:

- As a tablet user I would want a full screen experience. Using HASS Companion as the default launcher, it still shows the status/notification bar at the top and shows the button navigation at the bottom. This is unlike Fully Kiosk, which hides both.

• No way to set a screensaver timeout. I played with some Android settings but can't mimic what I can do with Fully Kiosk with a simple 30 second screensaver timeout.
• I have some automations that wake up the tablet and navigate to a certain page via Fully Kiosk. I'm not sure if I can accomplish this with deep links and the companion app - will have to give this a try still.
• I can set a schedule with Fully Kiosk that turn the screen off completely at night. I don't think I can do this with HASS companion.

I realize some of these use cases are niche, but for a wall tablet, these features are useful.

[mib1185]

As a tablet user I would want a full screen experience. Using HASS Companion as the default launcher, it still shows the status/notification bar at the top and shows the button navigation at the bottom. This is unlike Fully Kiosk, which hides both.

The companion app has also a full screen mode, it can be activated in the companion app sertings

[rac146]

Apologies, yes - setting fullscreen takes care of that!

[OlwinFroon]

The latest upgrade is an exciting step into the "one app to rule them all" direction.

Obviously, using it as "kiosk companion" wasn't the initial thought behind the idea when the app was conceived, but I like where this is going.

Over the years, we accumulated quite a lot of old android phones and tablets, and I've been itching to resurrect some of them as home control panels.

A while ago, I tried a few (Huawei, Nokia, Samsung), with varying success.

Some of them won't allow to switch the launcher.
Probably too restrictive branding.
I wouldn't give this problem too much thought.

The screen saver is an issue on most of them.
For some it doesn't work at all, for some I can't force the screen to turn off, for some I can't turn it on again.
I'll have to muster some time and patience to find out how it works exactly,
but I think it might be easier to skip the OS screen saver completely and let the app handle this.

Waking the screen via a simple HA control would be nice.
Using the internal camera as a motion sensor would be amazing.

Having HA send the app to a specific dashboard page works nicely, as far as I can recall.
Unless the screen saver kicked in. Oh well.

Like the OP, I'd very much like to see a sleep schedule, or at least a way to send the device to "half-sleep" (= go offline and turn the display off) for a certain amount of time / until a certain point in time / until somebody touches the display.
My WiFi is off during the night to reduce EM radiation.
Having my wall panels probe the WiFi all night would kinda defy the purpose.

[Nickxsch]

You can do a lot of what you want already with notification commands to the Companion App:
https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-commands

Camera sensor as motion sensor is difficult - you'd need a separate app to do that. See https://community.home-assistant.io/t/simple-and-free-turn-an-android-tablet-phone-on-off-based-on-camera-motion-detection/836908
Of course, that does not work when the wifi is off.

To manage your wifi on device, you'd have to use a separate app as well, like Tasker or similar. The companion app would become a beast if all this functionality has to be added - which I agree, would be very cool.