Homey Dashboards — Public Beta Megathread

Homey Dashboards is finally here! :tada:

Our team has truly outdone itself and shipped this grand new addition to the Homey app for iOS & Android. With many built-in widgets, an innovative column-based design that works great on both tablets and phones, a Widgets SDK for the Homey Developer Community and the same goodness for your homescreen — I’m super proud of Homey Dashboards.

Homey Dashboards can now be tested, once you’ve installed the latest experimental mobile app.

Getting Started

Homey Mobile App (v9.0.0+)
You need the latest experimental release for the iOS or Android app.

Homey Pro
Ensure that Homey Pro is updated to v12.1.0 or newer.

Homey Cloud
You don’t need to take action for Homey Cloud.

Creating your first Dashboard

Phone
On phones, navigate to More (...)Dashboards to create your first dashboards.

Alternatively, you can edit your homescreen by scrolling down and tapping ‘Customize’. This is a special homescreen dashboards that’s only accessible to you, and is saved on your phone.

Tablet
On tablets, navigate to Dashboards to create your first dashboards.

Alternatively, you can edit your homescreen by scrolling down and tapping ‘Customize’. This is a special homescreen dashboards that’s only accessible to you, and is saved on your tablet.

Pricing

Homey Dashboards is included with Homey Pro (Early 2023) and Homey Cloud (Free and Premium).

For Homey Pro (2016 — 2019) customers, Homey Dashboards will be available for a one-time fee of €25, similar to Advanced Flow. During the public beta, Homey Dashboards can be tested for free (as long as there’s room in iOS TestFlight).

System Widgets

These are the widgets that are part of Homey, and can be used in any dashboard.

  • Devices
    • Favorites
    • Zone
    • Custom
  • Flows
    • Favorites
    • Custom
  • Moods
    • Favorites
    • Zone
    • Custom
  • Speakers
    • Large
    • Small
  • Insights
    • Chart Line
  • Logic
    • Variables
  • Camera
    • Snapshot
  • Batteries
    • Low
    • Devices
  • Weather
    • Current Location
  • Family & Guests
    • Profile
  • Timeline
    • Small
    • Large
  • Web
    • Frame
  • …with more to follow!

App Widgets

This is for the Homey Community Developers, and it’s where the fun really starts. We’ve designed a Widgets SDK, that’s part of the Homey Apps SDK. Essentially, your Homey app can embed one or more widgets that users can choose from. Every widget is a small HTML/CSS/JS website with their own Web API.

Ready to get started to create your first widget? Start by reading the documentation »

To show what’s possible, here’s a widget for HUUM that I made last Friday, in just a few hours. Creating widgets is really that simple & powerful.

ScreenRecording_09-28-2024 14-55-49_1

Hall of Fame

These are widget-powered apps that have been published by the Homey Developer Community or Athom.

View all apps with widgets »

Coming Soon

The Homey App Store will be updated to show the widgets on an app’s webpage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Homey Dashboards work locally?
Homey Dashboards is part of the Homey app for iOS/Android, which works locally. So yes, if your device is part of the same Wi-Fi network as Homey Pro, Homey Dashboards does not need internet itself. But it doesn’t only work locally. You can view your dashboards from anywhere, and from any device!

Why do I have to pay for Homey Dashboards as Homey Pro (2016—2019) owner?
We believe that the previous generation Homey Pro is still powerful, and we just don’t like e-waste. However, we also need to put extra effort in supporting an older operating system, and that costs money. The easy way was to only publish Homey Dashboards on the current generation devices, but we feel we and the industry can do better than that, so we try to set an example.

Will Homey Dashboards be coming to the Homey Web App?
At this time we’d rather spend our time on building new features, than doing the same work again for web. Homey Dashboards is more performant on mobile devices, and we did expect some people to grab an old tablet from a drawer and expect it to work. If we made Homey Dashboards for web first, it simply wouldn’t have been as performant as it is now.

Bugs & Problems

This is a beta, and we wanted to ship Homey Dashboards a bit earlier than we would usually do, to get it into your hands as soon as possible. So naturally, the current state may be a bit rough around the edges.

If you encounter any issue, please let us know here in the thread!

If you see your issue already mentioned, please tap the :heart:-icon of that post. Our team will be monitoring this thread and tries to fix everything as soon as possible.

And if everything works great, or you just want to say thanks, leave a :heart: to this post to let our team know you love Homey Dashboards!

53 Likes

Flow Checker widget:

Flow CheckersourceView example image

8 Likes

Done my first little dashboard :grinning:.
How to launch the dashboard?
Can it only be done through the Homey app?
Can it be shared to others in the family via an url?

8 Likes

I’m not a developer. But I’m wondering. Is a widget limited to controll devices within the app it’s made for or can it be made to controll any device on homey?
My worry is that for instance Philips Hue gets a widget to controll lights, Ikea gets a widget to controll lights and so on. Then we will have several widgets that does the exact same thing but probably look quite different. This will lead to a cluttered dashboard.

My wish would be that there is a light widget and then you can chose what device(s) that widget controls. Of course there can be several designs to chose from, but I wouldn’t want 4-5 differently designed widgets to turn on or of a light.

2 Likes

A lights widget is on our list for exactly this reason :ok_hand:t2:

19 Likes

Perfect. This will of course also apply to thermostats, blinds and loads of other devices.
Will developers also be able to create these “universal” widgets?

6 Likes

This was quicker than I expected the dashboards to launch in beta.
Hopefully I can tinker with a first widget for my Twitch app this weekend.

Looks like the padding for the x-axis labels is of when displaying the widget in landscape! They’re too close to the bottom of the widget, portrait looks fine!


1 Like

Widgets could in theory control any device. I have built widget only app that I am playing with that shows all the capabilities of any device. So far I haven’t added any controls, but I that is my next phase.

13 Likes

Great, that’s pretty much what I had in mind.

I’m also playing with a weather forecast widget for my Weather Underground app

15 Likes

Some of the custom web widgets that I’ve created over the past weeks…

I will try to share them soon.

28 Likes

Very nice!
I would be nice if you were able to swipe through dashboards from the ‘Home’ view instead of going to More>Dashboards>’My Dashboard’

Saves a few clicks

17 Likes

Awesome. Thanks.

What are the requirements or supported cameras at the moment? When I try to add one of my Tyua cameras it says that it cant find any.

Thanks Athom for the great work!

Dashboards could become a great solution / workaround for a feature that’s been requested time and again: access control. While adding access control to each individual device and flow would be complicated and cumbersome, as explained by @Emile a while back, restricting access to only specific dashboards and nothing else could solve most of the access control needs with very little development effort. What would be sufficient, in my opinion, would be to:

  1. Add access control to dashboards, so that Homey “Managers” can create dashboards that only certain users can see/use
  2. Create a “Dashboard-only” user level below “Guest” that can only use dashboards - and of course only the dashboards that they are allowed to see

What do you think, Athom?

17 Likes

—fixed—

Just to check, you need to be a member of the beta team to be able to work with dashboards right? I can’t just update my app and get started?

1 Like

Thanks for the great work! But found an issue. When I want to add some devices in a widget, on my phone it works. But on my tablet it doesnt show the devices to pick ftom. Probably an issue with memory on the tablet. But still…

Also a request. Insights in one graph. For instance my solar panels versus the energy I take from the grid, hopefully Robin de Gruijter can make the widget for pbth

5 Likes

Check the Getting Started section in Emile’s first post, you need to install beta SW on your phone
/tablet.

Just follow the link to the android or ios app.

thanks, i was able to update the mobile app, so I’m in :smiley: