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Home Automation Weekly

Home Assistant 2026.10: What Breaks, and HACS Goes Core

The Home Assistant 2026.10 breaking changes worth checking before you update, and what happens to your HACS downloads when the built-in Marketplace takes over in 2026.11.

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Home Assistant 2026.10: What Breaks, and HACS Goes Core

Home Assistant 2026.10 came out October 7, and the release notes are long. Here's what stood out to me, starting with the part that can bite you. Then the bigger story for anyone with HACS installed: starting with 2026.11, HACS becomes a built-in Marketplace, and the HACS project's own docs now say so.

Check these before you update

These are the breaking changes I'd search a config for:

  • Legacy auth username mode is removed.
  • mqtt.publish and mqtt.dump now require an administrator account. Anything non-admin calling them stops working.
  • synology_dsm.reboot and synology_dsm.shutdown now require admin.
  • State conditions that combine for with attributes or lists now fail validation. This is the sneaky one: an automation that worked yesterday throws a validation error today.
  • Several integrations are gone, including SolarEdge Local, Dublin Bus and Sigfox.

Two patches have followed: 2026.10.1 on October 10 and 2026.10.2 on October 16. The second includes "Revoke refresh tokens when removing a user" and a fix for Alexa RequireRelink handling on cloud entity registry updates.

The change I'd actually use: trigger IDs

Trigger IDs get a real UI. You check the triggers you want in the condition, and Home Assistant handles the IDs behind the scenes. The trigger ID field leaves the editor, but IDs defined in YAML "keep working exactly as before." Nothing to migrate, just less hand-editing.

Maps broke, then got fixed properly

Every map in Home Assistant broke in 2026.9 after the previous tile provider started requiring an API key. 2026.10 switches to vector tiles served by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, with a new Map tiles integration that caches tiles through your instance.

One-click MCP

The AI page under Settings > System now has a Model Context Protocol card. One click turns the server on, and the card lists the URLs to paste into your AI app. New setups expose everything and only let administrator accounts connect. That last part matters: an AI client with admin rights is an admin. The release notes don't cover remote access, so read the MCP Server integration docs before you open anything to the internet. KNX also gained AI tools in this release.

The rest, quickly

  • 15 new integrations, including SolarEdge Modbus, KACO Modbus, Sunsynk and Zonneplan, plus a Modbus panel under Settings > Connectivity.
  • Matter: switches for leak-sensor alarms (the notes mention IKEA's KLIPPBOK) and one-touch locking. Power devices now report frequency and power factor.
  • Template entities can now be climate entities.
  • Home Assistant Cloud is being renamed Home Assistant Link, planned for the December release.
  • The Z-Wave network map gets a neighbors toggle; lawn mowers get a stop action.

HACS becomes the Marketplace in 2026.11

OHF Daily reported on October 2 that Home Assistant is bringing HACS into a built-in Marketplace for community integrations, dashboard cards, themes and templates. The timing is no longer a rumor. The HACS documentation now says that "starting with Home Assistant 2026.11, HACS ships with Home Assistant itself, as the Marketplace integration," under Settings > Marketplace, and Home Assistant's contributor docs say the same.

What happens on the first start after you update, per the HACS docs:

  • Everything you downloaded with HACS stays installed and keeps getting updates. Custom repositories and update entities carry over, and the update entities keep their entity IDs, so automations and dashboards using them keep working.
  • HACS itself is removed. Bookmarks to /hacs open the Marketplace. Home Assistant blocks the HACS custom integration on 2026.11 and newer, so you can't reinstall it.
  • AppDaemon apps and Python scripts are no longer managed. Their files stay and keep working, but they stop getting updates. A repair tells you which ones are affected.
  • Dashboard resources are now served from /local/community/. The old /hacsfiles/ paths keep working, but if you configured resources in YAML, a repair reminds you to change them.
  • The Marketplace lives under Settings, not the sidebar.

Browsing and installing catalog items works without a GitHub account. Custom repositories and alternative versions still need a GitHub connection. Administrators have to accept a trust warning before anything installs or updates, and replacing a built-in integration needs an extra confirmation. The Marketplace PR itself is blunt that there are no signatures or checksums on what gets installed, so community code is still community code.

What I'd do this week

On 2026.10: search your automations for for combined with attribute or list conditions, and check anything that calls mqtt.publish or mqtt.dump from a non-admin account.

Before 2026.11: list which of your HACS downloads are AppDaemon apps or Python scripts, because those stop updating. If your dashboard resources are defined in YAML with /hacsfiles/ paths, plan to move them to /local/community/. And take a backup before either update.

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