Home Assistant 2026.11 shipped on November 4 and immediately retired one of its most beloved community additions: HACS, the third-party store that millions of users relied on for custom integrations, themes, and dashboard cards. It is not gone — it is now the built-in Marketplace. That difference matters more than it sounds, and there are four specific things you need to verify before you hit that update button.
HACS Is Now the Marketplace — Here’s What That Actually Means
The 2026.11 release notes describe HACS becoming Marketplace as one move, but it is really two. First, HACS (which was donated to the Open Home Foundation roughly 18 months ago) is now a core integration rather than a community one — it ships with Home Assistant itself, lives at Settings > Marketplace, and requires no separate installation. Second, the old standalone HACS install is blocked. If you try to install HACS as a custom integration on 2026.11 or newer, Home Assistant will refuse.
The migration is automatic. When Home Assistant starts after the 2026.11 update, Marketplace takes over. Your installed integrations stay. Your custom repositories carry over. Update entities keep their entity IDs, which means automations and dashboards that reference them should survive intact. The more visible improvement: you no longer need a GitHub account to browse the catalogue, and new integrations open their setup flow immediately without a restart.
The Four Things That Can Break
1. Custom Repositories Without hacs.json Will Stop Updating
This is the quiet one. Marketplace requires a hacs.json file in a repository’s release to install or update it. If a custom repository you rely on does not have that file, it will remain installed at its current version — but Marketplace cannot update it. It will not throw an error; it will just quietly stay behind.
Before you update, go to Settings > Marketplace > Custom Repositories and check whether the repos you depend on have hacs.json in their latest release. If they do not, consider whether you can live without updates or whether you need to file an issue upstream.
2. AppDaemon Apps and Python Scripts Are Orphaned
HACS used to manage updates for AppDaemon apps and Python scripts. Marketplace does not. These files remain on disk and will keep running, but they are now outside the update system entirely. Home Assistant will display a repair notification listing the affected items.
If you rely on AppDaemon heavily, you will need to establish a manual update process — or start watching for a community workaround. This is the change most likely to catch users off guard.
3. Any Code Referencing the HACS API Will Break
All hacs/ WebSocket commands now return an unknown-command error. The integration_entities(‘hacs’) template returns nothing. hass.data["hacs"] is gone. If you have custom integrations, Jinja templates, or automations that call into the HACS API directly, they will silently fail or throw errors after the update.
The fix is straightforward: replace integration_entities(‘hacs’) with integration_entities(‘marketplace’). For WebSocket commands, check the HACS migration documentation for the new equivalents.
4. Dashboard Names Will Look Different
This one is cosmetic, but it affects every install. Cards and badges that do not have an explicit name set now display the device name followed by the entity name — not the old friendly name. If your dashboards showed clean single-word labels before, expect some of them to now show longer compound names. You can fix these individually by setting explicit names on affected cards.
Everything Else Worth Knowing
Beyond the Marketplace, 2026.11 ships Matter 1.5 camera support with live WebRTC streaming, a Labs-preview two-way audio feature for Matter cameras and Reolink (requires HTTPS), Exclude Targets in automations so you can carve out specific entities or areas from a trigger’s scope, automatic dashboard sections that populate themselves, and 38 new integrations including Bosch Smart Camera, Flic Button, and Škoda. The full changelog lists eight additional backward-incompatible changes covering Control4, SMTP, Telegram, and Tomorrow.io.
Update Checklist
- Check custom repositories for a
hacs.jsonfile in their latest release - Identify AppDaemon apps or Python scripts managed by HACS — plan for manual updates
- Search templates and custom integrations for
hacs/commands orintegration_entities(‘hacs’) - Accept that some dashboard card names will need manual cleanup post-update
The community forum thread shows mostly clean migrations, though a handful of users needed multiple update attempts. The 2026.11.1 patch is already out addressing the first wave of post-launch reports. This is a release worth taking — just check those four items first.
