Home Assistant 2026.8 Drops the :8123 Port Requirement and Strips 'Advanced' Labels in Push for Approachability
Home Assistant's August release removes the long-standing :8123 port requirement for new installs and strips 'advanced' and 'expert' wording from roughly 43 places in the app.
Overview
The Open Home Foundation released Home Assistant 2026.8 on August 5, 2026, under the theme “Approachable by design,” removing the long-standing requirement to append :8123 to the address when reaching new installations and stripping “advanced” and “expert” labeling from dozens of places across the open-source home automation platform.
What We Know
The release notes were presented by Ashley, described as “the Technical Program Manager at the Open Home Foundation,” who wrote: “With Frenck taking a well-deserved break, Bram and I are teaming up to handle things this time around,” according to the Home Assistant blog.
The headline change addresses a piece of setup trivia that has followed the project for years. “For years, reaching Home Assistant meant remembering to add :8123 to the address, a little piece of technical trivia that everyone simply had to learn,” the post states. “This release starts to put that right,” according to Home Assistant. New Home Assistant OS installations now reach the interface at a normal web address with no port number to append; existing installations are unaffected by default, and users can still change the port manually through the interface.
The second major thread of the release is the removal of skill-level labeling throughout the product. “Labels like advanced and expert were dotted around Home Assistant,” the post says. “Words like these can be discouraging: they suggest a feature is not for you and steer you away from trying it, even when it is perfectly approachable,” according to Home Assistant. The post specifies the scope of the change: “This release removes that wording in around 43 places, across the app, its documentation, and the companion apps.” In the same spirit, the section of the interface previously called Developer Tools “is now simply Tools,” per the same post.
Other changes ship alongside the wording and port updates. The release notes state that “you can rename an entity ID yourself, and control how it is ordered, so your entities follow whatever naming pattern makes sense to you,” replacing automatic naming generated from area names, according to Home Assistant. Devices are now “restricted to a single config entry and at most one subentry,” the post states, with devices that had previously been merged across multiple integrations automatically separated during the update so entities move to the correct device rather than mixing conflicting model or serial-number details. The Home Assistant Cloud settings page was also rebuilt, with the post crediting the redesign directly: “A big thank you to @klejejs for this redesign!”
On performance, the release notes state that “templates with a numeric result are up to 40% faster, and templates used on dashboards can now be cached,” according to Home Assistant.
The release also adds more than a dozen new integrations, including Dyson Infrared, Google Health, LiteLLM, llama.cpp, Midea, NeoPool, Lyngdorf, Gatus, GeoSphere Austria Warnings, Karakeep, Harbor Sleep, Harman Luxury Audio, Fuelprices.dk, LED Infrared, and ScorpionTrack, per the Home Assistant blog.
The update carries several backward-incompatible changes. According to the Home Assistant 2026.8 changelog, the release removes deprecated battery-related properties across a run of integrations, listed individually as “Remove battery prop from template vacuum,” “Remove deprecated battery level prop from Neato vacuum,” “Remove previously deprecated battery props from Romy,” “Remove previously deprecated battery props from tplink,” “Remove previously deprecated battery props from xiaomi_miio,” “Remove previously deprecated battery props from Sharkiq,” and “Remove previously deprecated battery prop from LG thinq,” alongside a separate entry to “Remove deprecated classes from Service.”
A follow-up patch, version 2026.8.1, shipped on August 7, according to the Home Assistant blog.
What We Don’t Know
The release notes do not specify which port number, if any, replaces :8123 on new installations, only that no port number needs to be typed. The exact total count of new integrations added in 2026.8 is also not stated as a single figure in the release notes beyond the list of individual integrations named above.