Home Assistant 2026.11: HACS Moves In and Your Names Change. Check These First

Most Home Assistant releases are a list of nice-to-haves. You update, a few cards get prettier, and nothing you rely on moves.

2026.11 isn't one of those. Two changes in it will be visible to everyone in the house: HACS becomes a built-in Marketplace, and entities get new display names. There's also a login change that can lock out remote users, and a Z-Wave requirement that will stop things cold if you miss it.

Everything below comes from the 2026.11 release notes.

HACS is now the Marketplace

From the notes: "With this release, HACS becomes part of Home Assistant as the new Marketplace." It lives under Settings > Marketplace, works on every install type including Container, and "Everything in the Marketplace is free, and that will not change."

The practical changes I care about:

• No GitHub account to install or update. You only need a GitHub connection for custom repositories, and that uses GitHub's device sign-in, read-only, with no access to private repos.
• No restart to install. You pick Install and land straight in the integration's setup flow. Updates still need a restart for now.
• A risk notice you have to accept. Before installing anything, you agree that community projects are "not tested, audited, or supported by the Home Assistant project," and that they run inside your Home Assistant.
• Existing HACS users don't have to do anything. Home Assistant migrates HACS on first start after the update. Your installed projects, custom repositories and update entities carry over.
• Separate HACS is done. "The HACS installer stops at Home Assistant 2026.11," and the old HACS won't get new releases.

My take: this is good for the people who were scared off by the old install steps, and it puts a real warning in front of code that runs with full access to your house. That notice deserves more than a reflexive click. I covered the original announcement in my 2026.10 write-up if you want the background.

Entity names: the change everyone will notice

This one has been more than four years in the making, per the notes. You name an entity once, like "Temperature," and Home Assistant adds the context from the device and area. Their example: the "Temperature" of a "Thermostat" in the "Bedroom" shows up as "Thermostat Temperature."

Home Assistant is direct about it: "this is a backward-incompatible change." Cards, badges and rows without their own name will now show the device name followed by the entity name. Your dashboards are where you'll see it first, and in a busy house that's where someone will ask what happened.

What doesn't change, and this is the reassuring part:

• Entity IDs stay the same. Automations, scripts and dashboards keep working.
• Names you set yourself are kept. If a displayed name changes, the old name stays as an alias for voice assistants, so "turn on the ceiling light" still works.

What to watch:

• Templates. The friendly_name attribute is planned for deprecation. Use entity_name(), device_name() and area_name() instead. If you build notification text or dashboard labels from friendly_name, start moving now.
• Long names. The fix is quick: rename the device or the entity, turn on "Main entity of the device" for the one entity that represents the device, or set a name on the card.
• Power strips and multi-gang switches. Devices with several parts now get a child device per part, each with its own name and area. Tuya multi-channel switches are first; other integrations follow one by one.

Matter cameras and a talk button

The Matter integration now supports Matter 1.5 cameras, with live video and snapshots. Video streams over WebRTC directly between your browser and the camera. The catch is the Matter server: "Home Assistant only discovers cameras when the connected server does," so an older server means no cameras, no error.

There's also a two-way audio preview in Settings > System > Labs. In this release it covers Matter cameras and Reolink, and a Reolink camera has to use RTSP. It only works when you open Home Assistant over HTTPS for now, because browsers only allow microphone access on a secure connection.

The smaller things that will save someone a weekend

• Exclude targets. You can now exclude entities, devices, areas, floors and labels from an automation target, re-checked every time it runs. "All lights on this floor except the nursery" without a helper group.
• Local disk storage. You can add an internal or USB drive for backups, media or shared files. It has to be formatted already.
• LoRaWAN. Connect ChirpStack or The Things Network. SenseCAP is the first device integration.
• Zigbee Green Power in ZHA. The notes name Friends of Hue switches as the best-known example. That's the battery-free kinetic switch crowd.
• Better debugging. A "Triggered by" filter in Activity, trace links into called scripts, per-integration live logs, and an Action history tab.

There's also an AI section in these notes. An assistant on Home Assistant's LLM API can now call actions and reload integrations, and the MCP server gets a read-only option. That deserves its own piece, so I'm covering it separately.

Five things I'd check before updating

1. Z-Wave users: update zwave-js-server first. The notes say you must use zwave-js-server 3.11.0 or greater (schema 51).
2. Remote access by IP. If you reach Home Assistant at a public IP, a global IPv6 address or a Tailscale address (100.64.0.0/10), the address in your browser now has to match what Home Assistant sees, down to scheme, host and port. If it doesn't, login fails with "Invalid client id." The fix is adding your proxy to the HTTP integration's trusted proxies, or reaching Home Assistant through a domain name.
3. Core installs outside a virtual environment. Home Assistant no longer installs Python packages into the deps folder. Most people aren't on this install type. If you are, read that section of the notes.
4. Templates that use friendly_name. Search your config for it.
5. Your family's main dashboard. Take a screenshot before you update so you can put names back the way people expect.

The household angle

The timing is interesting. Home Assistant's Month of "What the Heck?!" runs through November, and this year it's specifically asking for feedback from new and non-technical users, "and people living in homes where someone else set it all up."

A naming change that rewrites labels on the kitchen tablet is exactly what those people notice. If someone in your house gets confused by the new names, that's the feedback Home Assistant says it wants this month. I'd send it.