HACS becomes the Marketplace in the Home Assistant 2026.11 beta

The other change you'll notice the minute you update is how entities get their names. You give an entity its own name, say Temperature, and Home Assistant adds the device name where it helps, plus the area on cards that ask for it. Rename the device and every entity on it follows.

Here's what to plan for. Cards, badges and rows without a name of their own now put the device name in front of the entity name, where they used to show the friendly name, so Off-peak consumption on a Power meter turns into Power meter Off-peak consumption. The release notes are upfront that this is backward-incompatible. Entity IDs stay the same, so automations and scripts keep working, and changed names live on as aliases for voice assistants. Templates that read friendly_name should move to entity_name(), device_name() and area_name(), since that attribute is headed for deprecation. Update your custom cards before you judge the result: the team sent changes to the makers of dozens of popular ones.

Ever stared at a lamp that switched on with nobody home? The beta brings a whole set of tools for that question. Tools gets an Action history tab listing the actions that were called, with their targets, the cause, the user and the data, which you can copy as YAML with one button. The Activity panel adds a Triggered by filter, so you can show only what a person, an automation or an integration like HomeKit did.

Traces now link into the exact run of the script they called, so you stop matching timestamps by hand. And a single bad reading no longer means wiping a whole statistic: in Tools, Statistics, you can delete just a time range and keep the rest. Of everything in 2026.11, this is the part to try first on a test install.

The Matter integration in the beta supports Matter 1.5 cameras: live video over WebRTC straight between your browser and the camera, snapshots, and a camera entity that follows the privacy mode. You'll need a Matter server new enough to know about cameras, since Home Assistant only discovers them when the connected server does. The Matter Server app was the directory's biggest mover this week, too, with 2,455 new installs.

Two-way audio comes along as a Labs preview you switch on under Settings, System, Labs. It puts a talk button on the live stream for Matter cameras and Reolink, and a Reolink camera has to use RTSP for it, because RTMP and FLV can't carry audio back. Browsers only hand over the microphone on a secure connection, so you'll need to open Home Assistant over HTTPS.

A frozen sensor is the sneaky kind of broken: the dashboard keeps showing minus 18 degrees while the freezer thaws. Device Sentinel, new in the directory this week, learns how often each device really reports and flags it when it stays silent longer than its own rhythm allows. A chatty motion sensor gets a tight window, a twice-a-day rain gauge a loose one.

Its repository says it judges batteries against a level you set and against how fast they're draining, and turns a dead Zigbee2MQTT bridge, ZHA coordinator or MQTT broker into one alert instead of sixty. Problems land in a single to-do list. It's a pre-release with breaking changes expected, and it needs patience: freeze detection arms after a week, and signal baselines take three.

In VulpoVulpo shows Device Sentinel's sensors on its Button and Chart cards and on Apple Watch.