WallPanel is an Android kiosk browser for web-based dashboards and home automation platforms — Home Assistant, openHAB, Node-RED, or any other web page. It runs full-screen on a wall-mounted tablet, can act as the device's home screen, and adds the things a dashboard on a wall needs: a screensaver that wakes on motion or a face, camera streaming and detection, text-to-speech, device sensor reporting, and remote control over MQTT or HTTP.
This fork exists because the app it descends from was archived and the tablet running it kept crashing. It is a maintenance fork: fixes, a modernised toolchain, and a set of defects the ancestors left behind. See How this fork came to be for the lineage and a release-by-release history.
Production ready on one setup — tested on exactly one device. Use at your own risk.
It runs daily on a Lenovo TB-J616F tablet on Android 12, driving a Home Assistant dashboard, and it is stable there. That is the whole test matrix. There is no CI device lab, no coverage of other vendors, OS versions or screen sizes, and no guarantee that a fix which works around one tablet's firmware quirk is right for yours. Every release is built from source, signed with our own key, and verified on that one panel before it ships.
Sideload the signed APK from the releases page. There is no Play Store build of this fork — the Play Store listing belongs to TheTimeWalker's archived project, not to this one.
adb install -r WallPanelApp-universal-<version>.apk
The application id is xyz.wallpanel.app.kmb, not xyz.wallpanel.app. That is
deliberate: it installs alongside any other WallPanel build rather than replacing it,
so you can try this fork without losing a working install. Debug builds add a further
.dev suffix.
Open the app, tap the floating dashboard icon to reach the settings, and set your
dashboard URL. The default settings code is 1234 — change it.
On MediaTek hardware, a vendor service called DuraSpeed can stop the browser engine from starting. The app can turn it off by itself, but only if it holds the permission to write secure settings, which cannot be granted from the device:
adb shell pm grant xyz.wallpanel.app.kmb android.permission.WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS
Skip this unless you have a MediaTek device. See MediaTek DuraSpeed for what the problem looks like and how to check whether you have it.
- Any web-based dashboard or home automation front end.
- Can be set as the Android home screen, for a true kiosk.
- Settings protected by a code; the settings button can be hidden.
- Camera support: video streaming, motion detection, face detection, QR code reading.
- Google Text-to-Speech, driven by MQTT or HTTP.
- MQTT and HTTP commands for remote control — URL, brightness, wake, speak, and more.
- Device sensor reporting: temperature, light, pressure, battery.
- MJPEG streaming server using the device camera.
- Screensaver, dismissed by motion or face detection.
- Launching external applications via intent URLs.
- Android 8.0 (API 26) or later. The minimum was raised from Android 4.4 (API 19) in kmb.6; the compatibility branches for older releases are gone.
- A WebView capable of rendering your dashboard. Android renders pages with the system WebView component, which is not Chrome and does not always match it. If a page renders in Chrome but not here, update the Android System WebView from the Play Store — there is nothing the app can do about it.
- For Android 4.0–4.3 devices, the legacy version of the original app is the only option. This fork does not support them.
The app opens on a welcome page with a link to the settings. Everything is configured there: the dashboard URL, the settings access code, camera and detection options, the screensaver, MQTT broker details, and the HTTP server.
Setting WallPanel as the default home application makes it load as your home screen every time. That is the point for a wall panel, but it is awkward to undo without uninstalling — only do it if you want kiosk behaviour.
Unchanged from the upstream project. Commands can set the dashboard URL, adjust screen brightness, wake the screen, speak a message, show a notification and more, and the app publishes sensor and state data back. The command and topic reference lives in the original project's documentation (archived, but still the reference for the API surface).
On some MediaTek devices (Lenovo tablets among them), a vendor service called DuraSpeed can stop WallPanel's browser engine from starting. The app comes up, holds focus and looks alive, but the dashboard never appears — the page stays blank because the WebView never gets a renderer process. Nothing is logged by the browser engine when this happens; it simply goes quiet.
This mostly affects developers, not everyday users. In testing on an affected tablet, a
force-stop from Settings > Apps > WallPanel > Force stop never triggered it (5 out of 5
launches were fine), while an adb shell am force-stop followed by a relaunch triggered it
every time. If you are not force-stopping the app over adb, you are unlikely to see it.
Check whether your device ships DuraSpeed at all:
adb shell getprop persist.vendor.duraspeed.support
1 means it does. WallPanel also says so on its Settings > About screen.
Turn DuraSpeed off, then restart the app:
adb shell settings put global setting.duraspeed.enabled 0
adb shell am force-stop xyz.wallpanel.app.kmb
adb shell am start -n xyz.wallpanel.app.kmb/xyz.wallpanel.app.ui.activities.BrowserActivityNative
(Debug builds add a .dev suffix to that application id.) With the setting at 0 the
force-stop is safe.
The setting does not survive a reboot. To make WallPanel turn DuraSpeed off by itself on every start, grant it the permission to write secure settings:
adb shell pm grant xyz.wallpanel.app.kmb android.permission.WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS
The app then clears the flag in Application.onCreate, before any WebView is built. This is
enough to recover an app that is already being suppressed, not just to prevent it — the
suppression is re-evaluated when the renderer is requested, so clearing the flag at startup
lets the renderer bind normally on that same launch. Without the permission the app logs that
it does not hold it and carries on; the permission cannot be granted without a computer, so
most installs will not have it.
If a load times out on a DuraSpeed device with no renderer attached, the app says so and offers the command above to copy, rather than sitting on a blank screen.
./gradlew assembleProdDebug
- Flavours:
dev,qa,prod. Useprodfor anything you actually install —devandqaread optional build-time defaults (dashboard URL, MQTT broker and credentials, settings code) fromlocal.propertiesand bake them intoBuildConfig. - JDK: Gradle runs on JDK 17–25; compilation is pinned to JDK 17 by a toolchain declaration in the module.
- Android SDK:
compileSdk35,targetSdk34,minSdk26. SetANDROID_HOME, or putsdk.dir=/path/to/Android/sdkinlocal.properties. - No Firebase, no Crashlytics. They were removed in kmb.4 and there is nothing to
configure — no
google-services.json, no conditional plugin block. Dependency injection is Hilt, annotation processing is KSP, and kapt is gone entirely.
Bug reports, feature requests and pull requests are welcome at kmbrimble/wallpanel-android/issues. Bear in mind the status note above: a change can only realistically be verified on one tablet here, so anything device-specific needs your own testing.
This codebase is five maintainers' work before it was ever touched here, and it is Apache 2.0 licensed throughout.
- Raimund Wege / ray0711 — wrote the original homeDash in March 2017, the Android dashboard browser with motion sensing and MQTT that everything below descends from.
- quadportnick — took homeDash on through 2017 as the WallPanel Project, where it was renamed from HomeDash to WallPanel.
- Michael Ritchie / ThanksMister — maintained and substantially developed WallPanel from 2018 to 2021, the period most of the current feature set comes from.
- Tony Stipanic / TheTimeWalker — maintained wallpanel-android from 2022, published the Play Store build, and archived the project in May 2025.
- Kristian Røste / Darknetzz — modernised the build after the archive, in early 2026, which is what made this fork practical.
- Everyone who contributed patches along the way; see the contributor graph.
The lineage below is established from the commit history carried in this repository and from GitHub's fork metadata, not from memory. Newest first.
kmbrimble/wallpanel-android — forked August 2026, from Darknetzz. After TheTimeWalker archived the project, several recently-updated forks were reviewed; Darknetzz's was chosen as the base because it had done the toolchain modernisation work — Gradle 9.x, Kotlin 2.x, a current AGP, Firebase made optional, product flavours — that the others had not. That fork's own README says it is "not yet fully working", and it was taken at face value: the first release here fixes two defects introduced by its changes. The fork has since gone well beyond a rebase, through a Hilt migration, a kapt-to-KSP move, a minSdk raise, a 67% APK size reduction, and a run of WebView and power-management fixes found by measuring the running panel rather than reading the code.
Darknetzz/wallpanel-android (Kristian Røste) — forked February 2026, from
TheTimeWalker. Modernised the build after the archive: Gradle 9.x, Kotlin 2.x, current
AGP, JDK 17–25, Firebase and Play Services made conditional on google-services.json
being present, and dev/prod flavours. Also added WebView render-process recovery and
deferred service initialisation. Self-described as not yet fully working.
TheTimeWalker/wallpanel-android (Tony Stipanic) — took the project over in 2022, when
ThanksMister's development wound down. Kept it current through 2023, including the SDK bump
to Android 13, and published the Play Store build under the xyz.wallpanel.app id.
Archived May 2025.
thanksmister/wallpanel-android (Michael Ritchie) — maintained from 2018 to 2021 and by far the largest single contribution to the codebase. Most of what the app does today — the camera and detection stack, text-to-speech, the MQTT and HTTP command surface, the sensor reporting, the screensaver — was built or rebuilt in this period.
WallPanel-Project/wallpanel-android (quadportnick) — forked March 2017, days after homeDash's first commit. This is where the project was renamed from HomeDash to WallPanel and where MQTT login and page-load status arrived. Now deprecated, pointing at ThanksMister's fork.
ray0711/homeDash (Raimund Wege) — first commit 18 March 2017. "Android Browser for Dashboards with Motion Sensor and MQTT integration." The root of the tree.
Versions are 0.12.0 Build 0-kmb.N, carried on TheTimeWalker's last version number.
| Release | What changed | Why |
|---|---|---|
| kmb.16 | Wifi lock changed from WIFI_MODE_FULL to WIFI_MODE_FULL_LOW_LATENCY; the misnamed partialWakeLock renamed to screenWakeLock; ABI splits dropped in favour of a single universal APK. |
AOSP documents WIFI_MODE_FULL as non-functional, and the tablet agreed — the lock was pure bookkeeping. There have been no native libraries in the APK since kmb.11, so the four ABI splits produced five byte-identical outputs. |
| kmb.15 | Removed allowFileAccessFromFileURLs and four dead WebSettings setters from the browser WebView. |
allowFileAccessFromFileURLs let JavaScript on a file:// origin read other local files. Nothing in the app needed it — it was added in 2018 for an SD-card dashboard feature whose storage permissions are long gone. Deprecation warnings in that file went 5 → 0. |
| kmb.14 | Replaced the Kotlin Gradle Plugin with AGP's built-in Kotlin; removed both android.builtInKotlin=false and android.newDsl=false; dropped the unused kotlin-parcelize plugin; KSP to 2.3.11. |
Those two opt-out flags are deleted in AGP 10.0. Closing the deadline now makes a future AGP bump routine. The recorded blocker turned out to be false in both halves — the project never used @Parcelize at all. |
| kmb.13 | AGP 9.3.2 → 9.4.0, Hilt/Dagger 2.59.2 → 2.60.1. | Routine version bumps, three lines. Verified with a full DI walk, because a Hilt bump regenerates the injection code and uninjected fields compile clean. |
| kmb.12 | The three @OnLifecycleEvent sites migrated to DefaultLifecycleObserver. |
The deprecated annotation resolved reflectively, which is not safe under minification — a hidden blocker on ever enabling R8. Measuring before and after also revealed that two of the three callbacks never fire in normal operation. |
| kmb.11 | Removed five unused dependency stacks: ML Kit, Retrofit, OkHttp, RxAndroid, and the HiveMQ minSdk backports. | Nothing referenced any of them. Release APK dropped 67%, from 27.9MB to 9.2MB — 12.7MB of that was ML Kit's two native libraries, stored uncompressed. play-services-vision, which is the live detector stack, was deliberately kept. |
| kmb.10 | hilt-compiler moved from kapt to KSP. kapt is gone from the project. |
kapt was the reason android.builtInKotlin=false existed, so this closed half the AGP 10.0 deadline. |
| kmb.9 | Detects and clears the MediaTek DuraSpeed flag at startup, with an About-screen indicator and an on-screen explanation when a load times out with no renderer. | Root cause of a wedge that had been under investigation for days: MediaTek's DuraSpeed silently refuses to spawn the sandboxed process the WebView needs for a renderer. The panel looks alive and never loads. An ancestor problem in the sense that no fork had ever accounted for the vendor service. |
| kmb.8 | The Dagger.android → Hilt migration. Signed but never promoted. | dagger.android was deprecated and blocking the toolchain work. Signed and verified but never installed on the panel; the migration reached the tablet in kmb.9. The changelog does not record why it was held back. |
| kmb.7 | Post-minSdk cleanup: AndroidX libraries swept to current stable, the three androidx.legacy libraries dropped, dead SDK_INT >= O branches deleted, enableJetifier removed. |
The tail of the kmb.6 minSdk raise — code and dependencies that only existed to support Android versions the app no longer runs on. |
| kmb.6 | minSdk raised 19 → 26; Gradle 9.7.1, AGP 9.3.2, Kotlin 2.2.21, Dagger 2.59.2. | API 19 was Android 4.4, from 2013. Holding it capped every AndroidX dependency and kept compatibility branches alive that had not been exercised in years. |
| kmb.5 | Fixed the renderer-crash wedge: configureWebSettings no longer caches the WebSettings object across a WebView rebuild. |
A single renderer crash permanently wedged the panel, reproduced twice. WebSettings is per-WebView-instance, but was cached in an activity-lifetime field — so after a rebuild every setting was applied to the destroyed WebView. The new one was left with JavaScript and DOM storage disabled, and Home Assistant's front end never booted. A latent bug inherited from the ancestors, not introduced here. |
| kmb.4 | Removed Firebase, Crashlytics and LeakCanary from the build. | Darknetzz's conditional gated only the Gradle plugins; the Firebase SDK dependencies were unconditional, so FirebaseInitProvider still ran on every launch — on a device holding Home Assistant credentials, for zero benefit, with no google-services.json to talk to. It did not reduce memory, which was the original hypothesis, but it was worth removing on its own terms. |
| kmb.3 | Reduced camera capture rate at the sensor; added logcat capture with retention. | An attempt on the app's large memory footprint. It did not work — the footprint is dominated by GPU memory for WebView compositing — but the capture infrastructure it brought is what later found the DuraSpeed root cause. |
| kmb.2 | Fixed the screensaver WebView's unhandled renderer crash; deleted dead code; added the on-device smoke test and a lint gate. | The screensaver ran a second WebView with no onRenderProcessGone handler at all, so a crash there took down the whole app process. Pre-existing, inherited. |
| kmb.1 | Fixed a hardware-acceleration regression in the renderer-crash rebuild path and a service handler leak; added the .kmb application id suffix and release plumbing. |
Both defects were introduced by Darknetzz's February 2026 changes: the crash-recovery rebuild hardcoded software rendering, and the new deferred-init handler was never cancelled on service teardown. The id suffix is what lets this fork install alongside another WallPanel build. |