0.87: SmartThings, Areas and Entity Registry UI. February 6, 2019 22 minutes reading time

Today we’re releasing Home Assistant 0.87, our third release of the year. Besides a bunch of bugs squashing and performance improvements, we got some cool new features too.

Let’s start with the big one: we now support SmartThings. Via a custom app that can be installed inside SmartThings, you can now push the state of each device in SmartThings, as soon as it changes, to Home Assistant. No more fiddling with MQTT bridges or other solutions. Big shoutout to @andrewsayre for making this possible. Have a look at the SmartThings docs to get started.

New in this release is a new area feature thanks to @Kane610. Areas will allow users to organize their devices by their physical area, like kitchen or living room. This will unlock a whole new range of possible new features (of which none are implemented yet). With this release, users will just be able to manage areas in the configuration panel and place devices in areas via the integration page. In the future, we’re planning to add area based user permissions and a Lovelace area card. If you can’t wait to start leveraging areas today, @thomasloven has created a custom Lovelace card that can leverage areas.

This release also includes a UI to manage the entity registry. The entity registry contains all entities with unique IDs that Home Assistant has ever seen. It will allow users to quickly rename entities, change entity IDs or have Home Assistant forget entities that are no longer active.

We didn’t forget about the frontend in this release. In the last release we introduced Lovelace, so for this release we focused on bug squashing, performance improvements and usability. The YAML editor is now rendered using a full editor including line numbers thanks to @bramkragten. There is also a new system health component that will help users diagnose problems from the “info” developer tool. See changelog for the frontend.

In this release we have also upgraded the Material Design Icons to 3.3.92, which renames some icons. Make sure to check their changelog.

If you prefer a podcast over release notes, check out the Hass Podcast in which Phil and Rohan discuss each new Home Assistant release and keep a tap on what’s happening in the home automation space.

New Platforms

Release 0.87.1 - February 9

New Features

Add yeelight start_flow service and ability to declare custom effects (@zewelor - #20107) (light.yeelight docs) (new-feature)

If you need help…

…don’t hesitate to use our very active forums or join us for a little chat. The release notes have comments enabled but it’s preferred if you use the former communication channels. Thanks.

Reporting Issues

Experiencing issues introduced by this release? Please report them in our issue tracker. Make sure to fill in all fields of the issue template.

Breaking Changes

Beta Fixes

All changes