Key Takeaways
- Home Assistant’s 2025.12 update introduced global dashboards, impacting users with multiple devices.
- A workaround was created by utilizing JavaScript to restore device-specific dashboard functionality.
- Four bugs were identified and fixed to enable the workaround, though future updates may disrupt it again.
Restoring Device-Specific Dashboards in Home Assistant
The recent 2025.12 update of Home Assistant introduced system-wide dashboards, simplifying usage for single-user setups but complicating things for those with multiple devices. This caused inconvenience for users needing different dashboards for each device, prompting a search for a solution.
A workaround was discovered on the Home Assistant community forum, which implemented a custom sidebar panel using JavaScript. This approach created a dropdown menu for dashboard selection and stored preferences in the browser’s local storage, overriding the new global defaults. However, this fix initially contained four bugs that hindered its effectiveness.
The first issue involved a persistent global default that the Home Assistant system prioritized over local settings. The second bug was related to initialization errors when a user accessed the panel from a fresh tab, leading to a blank page. Issues with the dropdown functionality followed, where the new component changes caused the dashboard options to become unresponsive. Lastly, aggressive caching in Home Assistant prevented updates to the script from being recognized instantly.
To resolve these bugs, the author systematically addressed each one, changing how certain elements pulled from Home Assistant’s main script, updating the dropdown method, and implementing a cache-busting strategy. This process successfully restored the intended functionality, allowing each device to boot to its preferred dashboard.
While the solution is effective, it remains a workaround rather than an official feature. Users are cautioned that future Home Assistant updates might disrupt this workaround, but it does enhance the overall user experience by reintroducing device-specific customization options within the dashboard setup.
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