I Tested Home Assistant 2026.2 Beta – These Changes Are Huge

Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel.

Today I'm taking a first look at the brand

new Home Assistant 2026.2 February release.

And yes, this one is still in beta, but wow, it's packed with new features.

If you're curious about what's coming next,

what's already working and whether it's worth

trying the beta right now, stick around, because I'm breaking it all down.

Let's do this.

The home dashboard was in test a couple of months and now it is official and new.

So the home dashboard is now replacing the overview dashboard.

You can still create an own overview dashboard,

but the home dashboard is now the new dashboard

new users will see when they start with Home Assistant.

One of the things that you see in the home dashboard is this button.

Now it is devices discovered.

So it instantly shows which devices are

discovered and you can add them immediately to your home

dashboard.

Then when I go to an area, for instance, the

office, and I click on the pencil in the upper

right corner, then you can immediately add climate sensors here.

It was already possible in another interface, but now you can do it right here.

And the top bar is now the same color as the background.

It first was blue and now it is gray.

Then another thing that is changed is that

the developer tools are no longer visible

in the menu over here.

You now have to go to settings and in

settings you will find the developer tools here.

Next to that, there is also now a matter option

in the settings menu, which wasn't there before.

Another thing is that you now have a general search in Home Assistant.

If you press Ctrl K or Command K, you get

this interface and you can search for commands,

entities, devices, areas, or navigate.

This is not going to replace the former E and C commands, so I can still click on E

and I can search for entities or I can click

on C and I can search for commands and that

is still working.

So this might make your life a bit easier.

And when we go to settings, there is no longer

an option Add-ons, but it is renamed to Apps.

So this is now what formerly was the Add-on section.

It's now Apps.

There is also no longer an Add-on store, but an App Store.

So there is this Install App button and now you are in the App Store.

You can still add your own repositories over here if you want.

It all feels a bit quicker.

It is totally overhauled, so it looks really nice.

Let me know in the comments what you think

about renaming Add-ons to Apps in this case.

Another new thing is the following.

If I go to settings and then go to system and

then labs, then you see here Device Database.

You can enable the Device Database.

I already did that.

And what it does, it sends what devices you use in your system to Home Assistant.

It is totally anonymous and it will only send aggregated data.

Aggregated, aggregated, aggregated, aggregated data.

And what it is meant for is that people

that will start with Home Assistant or yourself

if you want to buy a new device, you can look

up if your device is Home Assistant compatible.

So if we go to that database, there is this URL.

I will put it in the description of this video.

You click on statistics, you get this statistics page.

Let's refresh it.

Let's see if something happened already.

And here you can find all the models and

manufacturers of products that work in Home Assistant in

this database.

So the whole community is sending their data to this database.

So you can see if the device that you want

to buy that you can use it in Home Assistant.

So this is really nice.

So you never have to ask yourself, can I use this device in Home Assistant?

Just look it up in this database and you're good to go.

You can also turn it off or on or off or on.

If you go to settings and then go to

system and then go to analytics, then here's the

option device analytics.

You can turn it off and you can turn it on so that your data is sent or not.

Oh, and beware that it will only contain devices

that are supported by the core of Home Assistant.

So devices that are only supported by HACS are not in this database.

Then there are new triggers and conditions added if you enabled in the labs.

Let's see, where is it?

System labs.

If you enable purpose specific triggers

and conditions, you get a different interface

in the automations editor of Home Assistant

that was, I think, introduced two releases

ago.

So if you go to automation and scenes and I

click create automation, create new automation,

and then I go to add trigger.

Then there are some new triggers added and one of them is in calendar.

It is calendar event ended and calendar event started.

There's also now person entered home and

person left home and there is a vacuum, let's

see, and it is vacuum cleaner started returning to dock.

These are new.

Then if we go to conditions, there are a

lot more conditions now than we already had.

So I have to take a look here.

It's alarm control panel, assist satellite,

climate, device tracker, fan, humidifier, lawnmower,

lock, media player, person, siren, switch, and vacuum.

So for instance switch, if a switch is on, if

a switch is off, if alarm is armed vacation,

if alarm is armed, alarm is armed away, etc, etc.

So a lot more conditions are added now to the new automation editor.

And there is a new card.

Let's go to it.

Let's add this.

Add a new card and this is the distribution card.

And what the distribution card basically does is

that it shows you, for instance, the distribution

of energy in your home.

So it comes up with these standard entities,

but you can add your own entities or you can

remove entities.

And this might be handy for people who want

to know how power is divided in their house,

for instance.

Another thing which is added is if I go to

the header, let's say here, click on the three

dots, click edit.

I could already add badges there, but now I can also add buttons.

So I can, for instance, add a button.

Let's say an interaction, add an interaction.

Let's say perform action.

The action is, for instance, light dot turn off.

Let's say I want to turn off all my living room lights.

And now you see a button over here.

I can turn off my lights here.

Save.

So now you see here that I have a button here.

Give it another name.

Let's say this is lights.

It doesn't really make sense, but OK.

Done.

And if I click on this button, all the lights in my living room will be turned off.

And there is another thing.

If you go to your profile now and you go

to themes, you can now select a theme, but the

theme is now user specific.

So it will adapt on every device that you use where you are logged in.

OK.

Then there are a lot of new integrations.

And one of them is really interesting.

That is the CloudFlare integration where

you can back up Home Assistant to CloudFlare.

There's Green Planet Energy, HD Fury, and NRG Kick, Prana, uHoo.

Let's see.

All the noteworthy improvements to existing integrations.

ESPHome now supports water heating devices.

And music-assistant integration now supports pre-announcing URLs.

That's also very nice.

What I also like is that the Reolink integration is still being updated.

And now you can trigger a special chime when your furry friends are at the door.

So probably if an animal is detected by

your Reolink camera, you can, for instance, let

your chime say "meow" or something like that.

Let's see what's more here.

Well, there's a lot of done on integrations.

There is also the other noteworthy changes.

The dashboard now supports different colors.

So that's really handy because now every

Google calendar can be shown in a different color

on your dashboard, which is really nice.

Developer tools have been moved to settings area.

I already told that.

So yeah, that's it for this time.

And of course, don't forget to look at the

backward incompatible changes because it might

be that some things break if you install this installation.

Let's see for a group.

The behavior of sensor group has changed.

Sensor group is now unavailable if all

group members are either unavailable or missing.

So you might experience some strange things there.

If you install this release, there's something for Sentry, Tractive, Tuya.

Duplicate HVAC modes have been converted to presets.

You may need to adjust service calls from set HVAC mode to set preset mode.

That's an interesting thing because I have that in my system.

So those are the backward incompatible changes.

And that's it for today's video.

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me know in the comments what you think about this new Home Assistant release.

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Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

Bye bye.