It’s been a year since we launched our first roadmap for Home Assistant, which means it’s time to launch this year’s first update! In 2025, we’re building on our direction to make Home Assistant easier to use for everyone in your household, and taking it to the next level by making smart homes more intuitive, proactive, and user-friendly. 🚀

This centers on helping Home Assistant understand devices in their context, and cataloging every device that works with Home Assistant through a new project, Device Database. And we will do this the Home Assistant way — through the power of our community and our collective intelligence. (…but that’s not all! The roadmap also covers many product areas we are aiming to work on from automation to voice to dashboard and more!)

If you’re new to our roadmaps or curious about how they guide the development of Home Assistant, be sure to check out our introduction to Home Assistant roadmaps. As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable, so please give us your thoughts in the comments.

• One year on the road
• The smart home administrator as an inventor
• From shared wisdom to collective intelligence
• Putting Devices in Context
• Introducing the Device Database
• And that’s not all for this year!
• Laying the Groundwork for a Truly Smart Home

Home Assistant 2025.5! 🎉

It’s time for the May release, and we have a lot to talk about! But before we do, I want to quickly touch on things that happened in the last month that you might have missed…

We recently hosted our State of the Open Home event—a live streamed show where we discussed the current state and future vision of the Open Home Foundation and its projects, including Home Assistant. During this event, we not only revealed our roadmap for the upcoming year but also celebrated a tremendous milestone:

2,000,000 active installations of Home Assistant worldwide! 🎉

Read more about the State of the Open Home in this summarized blog post

A community of 2 million households is something to celebrate! And we are doing that by gathering together in person on Home Assistant Community Day on May 24th 2025; over fifty! meetups are being organized all around the world! Want to learn more? Join a meetup? Or even host one?

Check out the Home Assistant Community Day 2025 blog post for more information!

Ok, the May release, really, I love this one! It is filled to the brim with quality of life improvements that I’m sure you will love. 🥰

The quest for a great backup system is continuing this release, shipping quite the list of improvements, most notably the ability to set a retention policy per backup location! Nabu Casa throws in a whole bunch of new text-to-speech voice variants 🗣️ included in your Home Assistant Cloud subscription, allowing your announcements to sound, for example, sad or happy!

But… there is more! Z-Wave gets Long Range support 📶, you can now copy and paste YAML automation snippets directly in our automation UI, a new tool to monitor the device discovery process in Home Assistant, and–my personal favorite–the improved experience when you pick an entity anywhere in the UI. 🤩

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

We’re thrilled to announce that Eve has joined the Works with Home Assistant program! Eve is at the forefront of the Matter standard and has some great Matter devices focused on local control and privacy in the home. They’re bringing a variety of devices to the program, including a couple of firsts!

Eve of a New Day for the Open Home

Eve, based in Germany and part of ABB, is known for making high-quality smart home devices. They’ve been an early proponent of Matter, as it really aligns with their philosophy of local and private control. In their own words, “No Eve cloud, no registration and no tracking so your data won’t get exposed. Local intelligence and direct communication between Eve devices and smartphones or hubs without cloud dependency.”

Our first Home Assistant Community Day will be on May 24th this year 🎉, and with a month to go, here is all the information you need to take part.

The community will be leading meetups across the globe, so find your nearest event and register now! They’re all free and will be full of smart people with smart homes. If you don’t see your city on this list, we’re encouraging the community to host their own meetups, so keep reading to learn more.

Our biggest party yet

I’m sure you’re all wondering, “Missy, what is a Community Day?”. In its simplest form, it’s a single day in which community members around the world set up local meetups with each other. That leaves a lot open, though. Where do you sign up? How do you host your own meetup? How many people should show up? Where’s the best place to hold a meetup? …that’s a lot of questions! 😳 Luckily, I have all the answers 😉.

We’re excited to announce that Reolink is the latest partner to join the Works with Home Assistant program.

Just recently, we had blinds join the program, and now we have Reolink bringing the first certified cameras and doorbells. Reolink has certified a wide range of their devices including battery-powered and wired options, as well as devices with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) and Wi-Fi connectivity.

When someone in the Home Assistant community asks for camera recommendations, Reolink often tops the list. This strong reputation is well-earned, as they prioritize local control, don’t require cloud connectivity for their advanced features, and support open protocols whenever possible.

The State of the Open Home 2025 has wrapped, and a big thanks to everyone who tuned in to the live stream! If you missed it, please check out the recording, it’s a slick production and definitely the best way to take it all in. For those who would rather read about all the updates and announcements, we’ve also got you covered with this blog.

It was an over 2-hour event, and if you need a shorter summary than this blog, here’s my best attempt 😅:

For all the juicy details, keep reading!

Home Assistant 2025.4! 🎉

It’s April 2nd, so this is definitely not an April Fool’s joke! 😃

But before diving into this month’s release, I want to quickly highlight something you might have missed—something I’m extremely excited about:

The State of the Open Home 2025!

Yes, you read that right! On Saturday, April 12th, 2025, we’ll be streaming a big live event on YouTube, sharing our vision for the Open Home Foundation, including the future of Home Assistant. Don’t miss it!

Alright, back to the release! As I was saying, it’s April already, and we have another fantastic release lined up for you.

The big news is the introduction of our new experimental Areas dashboard, which might evolve to become the default dashboard in the future. If you’re like me—not really a UI-oriented person—you’re going to love this one! 🤩

My personal absolute favorite feature this month is something I’ve dreamed of ever since we started working on voice assistants: the ability for your assistant to start a conversation proactively! This is a game changer—no other voice assistant on the market can do this! I’m going to have so much fun with this. 😃

If you’re a power user who loves templates, don’t worry—we’ve got you covered too! This release ships with a bunch of new template functions, making your life a lot easier.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

We’re excited to announce the latest partner to join the Works with Home Assistant program is Motionblinds! And if you’re wondering what type of products they provide, the clue really is in the name!

Motionblinds is the first Works with Home Assistant partner to certify smart window blinds. This brings us closer to a future where you can build a smart home exclusively with certified devices that give the best possible experience with Home Assistant.  Smart blinds integrated with Home Assistant unlock powerful automations, such as blinds opening when you get home, or closing sun-facing blinds on warmer days to keep your home cool.

Update: It happened and was great! Read the biggest highlights here or watch the full recording.

🚨On April 12th, we’re going live with this year’s State of the Open Home - our annual recap of the previous year and look ahead to the next. Just like past years, this live stream will be packed with awesome announcements, updates, and cool community highlights. (Got 11 hours to spare? Check out our last 5 State of live streams!)

This marks a full year since the founding of the Open Home Foundation and Home Assistant becoming part of the foundation. We’ll be taking a look back at what has been a very big year, and using this time to give you some big updates. These will include new projects becoming a part of the foundation 🚀, new supporters 🎉, and what’s in store for our Works with Home Assistant program 🤝.

We’ll also be highlighting some of the big findings of our 2024 Home Assistant survey, where over 8,500 of you told us about yourself, your homes, and how you use Home Assistant. We’ll also announce Home Assistant’s 2025 roadmap, and how your feedback is shaping the future of the Open Home.

🔔 Be sure to click to get notified when it starts (Saturday, April 12 - 18:00 GMT / 20:00 CEST / 14:00 EDT / 11:00 PDT), and we can’t wait to see you in the comments!

Matter in Home Assistant has been officially certified! 🎉 The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) has certified Home Assistant and the Open Home Foundation Matter Server, the first open-source project to receive this certification. Certification is proof that open source projects can sit among, or even above, big tech when it comes to providing the best smart home experience.

Home Assistant, as part of the Open Home Foundation, strongly believes in open standards. They embody our values of choice, privacy, and sustainability in the smart home. When a standard is well supported, consumers get access to a wide range of smart home devices that should work far into the future, which is great for sustainability. Best of all, they work locally, keeping your smart home data in your home.

All these benefits led us to include open standards certification in our roadmap. Home Assistant’s implementations of Matter, Zigbee, and Z-Wave are already industry-leading, so it only makes sense to clearly signal and give users peace of mind that we provide true compatibility. This most recent certification is not just big for Home Assistant, but read on to see how it also helps any open source project looking to use Matter.