2023.4 – Template Macros and Windows 11 (sort of)

• 2023.3 Android App update
  • Brings support for multiple servers!
  • The Home Assistant Android Companion app is now available via the Amazon Appstore on supported Windows 11 devices

  Windows does not always provide correct information to the app and may shut down background work, including sensors, after several minutes, which is why we are releasing Windows 11 support for the app as a preview. Android support in Windows 11 continues to get better and we intend to make adjustments to improve the experience in the future.

  • Any sensor with a location attached will now show up for navigation when using Android Auto.
  • Now Assist is only a tap away via Watchface complications
• Year of the voice Chapter 2 April 27th live stream will be on the Home Assistant YouTube channel
• Supervisor Security Vulnerability You can verify that you received the update on the Home Assistant About page  and verify that you are running Supervisor 2023.03.1 or later. If you do not see a Supervisor version on your About page, you do not use one of the affected installation types and have not been vulnerable.The security issue affected installation types Home Assistant OS and Home Assistant Supervised. This includes installations running on the Home Assistant Blue and Home Assistant Yellow.The issue allowed an attacker to remotely bypass authentication and interact directly with the Supervisor API. This gives an attacker access to install Home Assistant updates and manage add-ons and backups. Our analysis shows that this issue has been in Home Assistant since the introduction of the Supervisor in 2017.

New Features

• More Dialogs
  Alarm control panel, covers and fans now get new dialogs
• Tile Card
  The Tile card has been updated to support fan speeds and alarm panel modes. Very similar now to the Mushroom entity cards.The fan speed feature, will show buttons if there are 4 speeds or less, in all other cases, it will use the slider.

• Template Macros
  You no longer need to copy-and-paste Jinja templates everwhere. You can now store macros in new custom_templates folder which can then reference the macros everywhere.Thanks David Poll for this amazing contribution!

• More Templating Love
  relative_time and today_at will now update once per minute.There’s also a new is_hidden_entity function also added by David, which can tell if an entity has been marked as hidden in the UI. While David was there, he’s also added support for break and continue to for loops in templates.There’s also a new areas function which returns a list of all the areas you have.

  Finally if you want to check if an entity has a value (ie not in unavailable or unknown state) then there is a new has_value function

• Database Improvements
  There’s the standard talking points, faster, reduced IO.What we really care about though is now history is retained when you rename an entity!

• Spotify
  Now supports Podcasts!
• ESPHome
  Now supports pairing Bluetooth devices
• Attributes of the sun entity are now available as sensors
  Now you don’t need to use templates to automate based on elevation or azimuth.
• There are now energy and volume storage device classes. These allow to differentiate between, for example, consumed energy versus stored energy in a battery.