Home Assistant 2026.4 drops
Home Assistant 2026.4 landed with major platform upgrades—native infrared control for TVs/soundbars/fans, an entity-naming migration that preserves voice aliases, and cross-domain automations to trigger across sensors and climate devices (youtube.com). The release also adds 15+ new integrations (chess.com, Dropbox backup, LG infrared, UniFi Access, SolarMan, Lilac), plus six integrations bumped to platinum for improved reliability—time to plan an update if you run Home Assistant (youtube.com).
Home Assistant published 2026.4 as a beta pre-release in the core repository (2026.4.0b0/b1) ahead of the stable drop. (github.com)) The release is scheduled for April 1, 2026 on the project's milestone schedule. (github.com)) The codebase shows new integration components landing in the dev branch this cycle, including chess.com, an LG infrared component, and a Dropbox backup agent in the core repository. (github.com)) Core automation capabilities were expanded with new domain triggers and conditions—examples added in the 2026.4 milestone include water_heater.operation_mode_changed, humidifier.mode_changed and battery triggers, enabling more cross-domain sensor-to-climate automations. (github.com)) The project’s roadmap lists “completing the entity naming migration” as a prerequisite task for UI and voice work, while community threads show aliases historically tied to original entity records can require reconfiguration after registry changes. (github.com)) Home Assistant will enable the SecureTar v3 backup format by default in 2026.4, which switches to Argon2id for key derivation and XChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, and there are open user reports of restore problems with recent backups that make testing restores advisable before upgrading. (howtogeek.com))
