Released 7 October 2026, Home Assistant 2026.10 finally gives trigger IDs — the most powerful automation feature almost nobody used — a proper interface, and swaps its map for an OpenStreetMap vector layer after the previous provider broke every map overnight. Update, then merge the automations that duplicate the same logic across triggers.
On October 2, 2026, Nabu Casa announced it is renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, effective in the December release. The service itself is unchanged — what is being removed is the word ‘cloud’, deemed too tainted by Big Tech, and that is a signal for the whole self-hosted ecosystem.
Home Assistant has merged HACS, the community store that has distributed integrations, cards and themes for years, into an official system integration called Marketplace. Existing HACS installs are taken over automatically, but the trust model — no signatures, admin-only — does not change.
Schneider Electric announced a €1.2 billion voluntary takeover bid for Bulgaria’s Shelly Group on 24 September 2026, at €70 a share. For self-hosters who run Shelly relays over MQTT and Home Assistant without any cloud, the question is whether the open APIs outlive the industrial buyer.
On September 12, 2026, Frigate 0.18, the self-hosted AI object-detection NVR, replaced its YAML-first workflow with full UI-based configuration and added profiles and multi-provider GenAI. Back up your config and frigate.db, review the breaking changes, then migrate if you want UI configuration.
On September 2, 2026, Home Assistant 2026.9 modernizes Modbus so an industrial device can be picked from the UI without writing any YAML, and hardens the instance by passing through the real source IP of Cloud connections so IP banning actually works. Upgrade if you run Modbus gear or expose your instance.
The monthly 2026.9 release of Home Assistant brings a Matter network map (Wi-Fi and Thread) into the main interface, a Serial panel for USB radios, and a reworked Security dashboard. For the self-hoster, the mesh is no longer opaque: you can finally see why a device keeps dropping.
On August 26, 2026, the Open Home Foundation released the anonymized dataset of its first community survey, gathered from 8,616 Home Assistant users, on Zenodo. The lesson for any self-hosted project: you can do open research without exposing your users, if you anonymize properly.
On August 12, 2026 ESPHome launched its Starter Kit, the first official hardware product in the Open Home Foundation ecosystem. It promises local smart devices with no soldering and no code, and marks self-hosting’s entry into consumer hardware.
State of the Open Home 2026 confirmed what the numbers already showed: Home Assistant governs 250+ open-source projects, has 89,500 GitHub stars, and ships a new release every month. If you still trust Google or Amazon with your home automation, you’re paying for the privilege of being the product.
