“What the Heck?!” 2026: Everyone at home gets a say

WHAT THE HECK?! November 2026 TL;DR All of November is the Month of “What the Heck?!” Tell us what makes Home Assistant hard, confusing, or annoying for you in the WTH category on our forum. Everyone is welcome, and this year we’d love to hear from new and non-technical users, and people living in homes where someone else set it all up. Run Home Assistant yourself? Ask the people you live with how they feel about it! Let me start with a confession. I work on Home Assistant all day, for a living. And still, my own home has moments where the people I live with look at me and go: “What the heck?!” My most recent one? Profile pictures. For the longest time, your own profile picture in Home Assistant wasn’t actually yours to change. Only an administrator could do it, tucked away in the settings. So if someone in our house wanted a different picture, they had to ask me, every time. For something that is literally your face, that’s a bit odd, isn’t it? As of Home Assistant 2026.10, every user, administrator or not, can change their own picture straight from their profile. A tiny change, right? Well, my 13-year-old daughter Lilly now changes hers about every week. I’ve officially lost my job as household profile picture administrator. Best demotion ever 😄 Such a small thing, but it made a big difference in how at home she feels in Home Assistant. And that’s the kind of thing we easily overlook when working on it every day. So, guess what? It’s that time again. For the whole of November, we’re running the Month of “What the Heck?!” 🎉 Wait, what is this again? We always value your feedback, but don’t often ask for the tough kind outright. That changes this November. For one month, we open the floodgates. No technical words needed, no fancy format. Just one simple question: what in Home Assistant makes you go “what the heck?!” The setting you can never find. The moment your home did something and nobody in the household had any clue why. The thing you keep missing, and can’t believe isn’t here yet. All those little (and sometimes not so little) frustrations you’ve quietly learned to live with. We want to hear them. All of them. We only do this once every two years, and that’s on purpose. Two years is long enough for a lot to change, in Home Assistant itself and the smart home world around it. The technology moves on, and so do our expectations of what a smart home should do. What bugged you last time might be long gone, and something new might be driving you nuts today. Why we are doing this This year, the Open Home Foundation has been focusing on making Home Assistant more approachable. In other words: Home Assistant should not only work for the person who set it up. It should work for everyone who lives in the home. We’ve made good progress so far. But let’s be real: the people building Home Assistant are pretty bad at spotting what’s confusing about Home Assistant. We know where everything is. We know the workarounds. We stopped being confused years ago. That makes us terrible test subjects. You, on the other hand, are perfect. And so is everyone in your home. So this is your month. Complain (nicely), discuss, dream out loud, and tell us what would make Home Assistant better for you. This year, we want to hear from everyone Previous editions of WTH month were great. But most of what we heard came from a very specific group: the tinkerers. The people who write YAML for fun, run a dozen apps, and know what an entity ID is. I’m one of you. We are lovely people. Please keep the WTHs coming 😄 But this year, I want to explicitly invite everybody else too. You just started with Home Assistant. Everything is still fresh, and that “huh?” feeling you had during setup is gold to us. Write it down before you get used to it! You don’t consider yourself a “technical” person. You use Home Assistant, but you don’t want to tinker with it. You want things to just work. Tell us where it doesn’t feel that way. You live in a home where someone else runs Home Assistant. Your partner, parent, room-mate, or child set it all up, and now you live with it, every day. Do you ever feel a little locked out of your own home? This is the group we hear from least, and probably the one we can learn the most from. Home Assistant runs entire households, and most people in those households never open a settings page. Homework for those of us who run Home Assistant at home If you’re the one who maintains Home Assistant in your household, I have a small favor to ask. Go ask the people you live with how they feel about it. Not “is it working?” because they’ll politely say yes. Ask them for real. Fair warning: you might not like all the answers. I certainly didn’t. But there’s so much to learn from that conversation. Some questions to get it going: What’s the one thing about using Home Assistant that annoys you most? Can you find what you need in the app or on the dashboard? Where do you get lost

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