2026.6: Pick a card, any card

Home Assistant 2026.6! 🎉 I’m going to put my hand up right away: ✋ I am not a dashboard person. Not because I don’t like them; I love seeing what you all build. But designing a beautiful one is a kind of visual creativity I just don’t have. That’s a big part of why I love the built-in Home dashboard so much, it does the designing for me. But when I do build a custom dashboard, I usually stare at that “add a card” dialog for way too long, picking cards almost at random just to see if they look good with the data I have. So you can imagine my excitement for my personal favorite of this release: the new card picker. Instead of asking “which card type do I want?”, it now asks “which thing in your home do you want to show?”, and then suggests cards that actually make sense for it, with live previews using your own data. For someone like me, that’s not just easier; it’s genuinely inspiring. It nudges me towards combinations I would not have thought of on my own. 💡 This fits into a bigger direction I keep getting more excited about: Home Assistant getting better at starting from the thing you want to do, instead of asking you to first learn the building blocks. The same idea is what makes purpose-specific triggers and conditions in Home Assistant Labs feel so right, and this release brings them a big step closer to graduating out of Labs with brand new zone triggers and conditions. 📍 A close second favorite for me this release is everything happening around that in the automation editor: live test indicators on your conditions, target counts on every device, area, floor, and label, and proper notes you can attach to any step. Individually they are small quality-of-life touches; together, they make building automations feel a whole lot more transparent. ✨ And there is plenty more to love in this release: new tile card features, Z-Wave smart locks catching up with their Matter siblings, a friendlier Apps page, and another big batch of new integrations from our community. 🚀 Enjoy the release! ../Frenck A friendlier way to add cards to your dashboard Infrared now also listens Polishing the automation editor Purpose-specific triggers and conditions See exactly how many things an automation targets See at a glance which conditions pass Add notes to any step in your automation Tile card features Your forecast, right where you check the weather Turning the media player tile into a real remote Z-Wave smart lock credential management A fresh look for the Apps page Integrations New integrations Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations Integration quality scale achievements Now available to set up from the UI Farewell to the following Other noteworthy changes A clearer view of your home’s energy Quick links between everything you care about YAML linting inside the UI editors Patch releases 2026.6.1 - June 5 2026.6.2 - June 9 2026.6.3 - June 12 2026.6.4 - June 19 Need help? Join the community Backward-incompatible changes All changes A huge thank you to all the contributors who made this release possible! And a special shout-out to @piitaya who helped write the release notes this release. Also, @karwosts, @lexpostma, and @Petro31 for putting effort into tweaking its contents. Thanks to them, these release notes are in great shape. ❤️ A friendlier way to add cards to your dashboard Adding a card to a dashboard is one of those moments where Home Assistant has historically asked a lot of you. The old dialog opened on a wall of card types, all named after the building blocks we use under the hood: tile, entities, button, gauge, glance, picture, markdown, and so on. Lovely if you already know what each one does. A lot less lovely if you came in thinking “I just want my living room light on this dashboard.” 💡 User research kept telling us the same thing: people open the editor with a deviceA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. or an entityAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service. [Learn more] in mind, not a card type. So we flipped the dialog around. When you add a card now, the dialog opens on a new By entity tab. On the left, your home: a tree of floorsA floor in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of areas that are meant to match the physical floors in your home. Devices & entities are not assigned to floors but to areas. Floors can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions. For example, to turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you go to bed. [Learn more], areasAn area in Home Assistant is a logical grouping of devices and entities that represents a room or space in your home, such as the living room, kitchen, or garage. [Learn more], devices, and entities, the same shape some of you may recognize from the new purpose-specific triggers and conditions currently in Settings > Syste

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