Home Assistant is the best way to build your own smart home experience, and the Android app is one way to check your devices and update settings. The Home Assistant team has announced a few upcoming updates for the Android app, but those updates will also end support for some ancient devices.
One of the key improvements in the latest update is a new basic invite flow. This was designed to be consistent across both Android and iOS companion apps. This should make it much more seamless to add new users or set up new devices, eliminating the need to type URLs, especially on devices like Android Automotive. If you’ve ever tried to set up a new user or device on your Home Assistant, you know how much of a pain typing URLs can be on certain interfaces, so this is a welcome change.
The “My Links” feature has also been improved. My Links are those handy URLs that can whisk you away directly to an integration, blueprint, add-on, or settings page within Home Assistant. While they’ve always worked great on the desktop, they’ve been a bit clunky on mobile until recently. Now, you may expect to reach your destination with a single click, making it much easier to navigate and access specific Home Assistant elements on your Android device.
Looking ahead, the development team is focusing on better leveraging the diverse screen sizes and layouts found across Android devices by implementing edge-to-edge support. The recent update already has edge-to-edge working on native Android UI elements like the settings page, and the goal is to roll this out to other areas in future updates. Basically, this means more of your screen real estate will be utilized.
However, there is a change to device compatibility coming as well: the Home Assistant app will be ending support for Android 5.0 and 5.1. These were also known as Android Lollipop, which, let’s be fair, was released way back in 2014. Google has made it clear that starting in June 2025, many AndroidX libraries, which are crucial for app development, will require a minimum of Android 6.0 (API 23). Firebase Cloud Messaging has already made this requirement, too.
Google’s changes mean that to keep up with new features, security updates, and general development, the Home Assistant app will have to stop supporting Android 5.0 and 5.1 (API 21 and 22). However, it makes a lot of sense considering less than 0.3% of current installations are on these older Android versions.
If you’re using a device running Android 5.x, the app won’t be removed, but you won’t receive new updates once this change rolls out. The good news is that they plan to make one final release for these older versions before support officially ends, which is expected before the end of summer.
These updates will take time to come, so don’t expect anything right now. However, with the introduction of Timothy Nibeaudeau as a dedicated Android developer, these updates should come faster than they normally do.
