Home » Blog » What’s new in Home Assistant June 2025.6 release – Pickers, Bluetooth, Area Dashboard, Sidebar, and more!

What’s new in Home Assistant June 2025.6 release – Pickers, Bluetooth, Area Dashboard, Sidebar, and more!

Hi, I’m back with a brand-new ‘What’s New in Home Assistant’ video! This time, I’m covering the June 2025.6 release of Home Assistant. It offers several interesting features, including improvements to the pickers, enhanced understanding of your Bluetooth network, updates to the areas dashboard, sidebar enhancements, and more. Let’s do this!


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Ed

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First of all, I want to let you know that the June release will not be published on the first Wednesday of the month this time, but instead on the second Wednesday of June. That’s because the Open Home Foundation team will be at a meetup in Ireland during those days, which means they won’t be able to work on the beta version of Home Assistant 2025.6. So, you’ll need to be a little patient before you can try out the new features I’m about to show you. But of course, if you really can’t wait, you can always install the beta yourself!

Improving all the “pickers”

The dropdown menus (also known as pickers) used in Home Assistant to select entities, devices, areas, and other options in automations, scripts, and configuration options have been improved once again in this release. The search function has become much smarter, making it easier and faster to find the entity you’re looking for.

That improved search capability has now been added to area, category, floor, label, user, and device pickers as well.

Additionally, the device picker has received a visual upgrade. You’ll now see the integration’s icon and name displayed right in the picker.

Understanding your Bluetooth network

You can control Bluetooth devices in Home Assistant, and if you use Bluetooth proxies, you can easily extend your Bluetooth network throughout your home. The Bluetooth integration now offers a visual map of your Bluetooth devices, showing how everything is connected.

Iterations of the experimental area dashboard

The area dashboard was introduced in the April release. This release expands on it slightly. The dashboard now also displays actions if you’ve assigned scenes, scripts, or automations to a specific area.

In addition, helpers are now shown in an “Others” section, and the “Entertainment” section has been renamed to “Media Players.”

Deprecating installation methods and 32-bit architectures

Starting now, the Core and Supervised installation methods are officially deprecated. That means the Home Assistant team will no longer support them after six months from now. The focus is now entirely on Home Assistant OS and Home Assistant Container, making it easier for the team to maintain system stability.

Sidebar Improvements

I occasionally see questions about customizing the sidebar in Home Assistant. While this was previously possible by long-pressing the header above the sidebar, a new dialog box will now appear, allowing you to set the order and visibility of sidebar menu items. These sidebar settings are saved in your user profile, so they’ll be applied across all your devices where you use Home Assistant!

Join/unjoin groups of media players

This is a great new addition. You can now dynamically group media players. I can now easily group all my Sonos speakers from within the media player settings.

Reset/restore entity IDs

As you probably know, you can change an entity’s ID in Home Assistant. If, for any reason, you want to go back to the original entity ID, you can now do that with a single click. You can even reset all entity IDs for a device in one go.

Integrations

Of course, new integrations have also been added—you can find them listed [in this list]. One notable addition is the integration with Amazon Devices. If you use Amazon devices, such as Echo, Fire TV, or Alexa-enabled hardware, you can now control them directly in Home Assistant.

Additionally, numerous changes have been made to existing integrations, which are also listed below.

Other noteworthy changes

Besides all the new features I just showed you, there are more changes worth mentioning. You’ll find them listed [in this section]. Be sure to check the release notes for Home Assistant 2025.6 to review them at your own pace.

Backward-incompatible changes

As always, make sure to check the backward-incompatible changes before updating. Something might have changed that you currently depend on.

Right now, there’s only one known change: if you use Met Office, you’ll need to request a new API key to keep it working in Home Assistant 2025.6.

And that wraps up my summary of what’s new in Home Assistant 2025.6! I hope this video was helpful. If my videos help you, please consider supporting me with a monthly sponsorship, just like these amazing people already do. It helps me keep creating tutorials and smart home reviews for you. Please check the links in the description for information on how you can support me.

Don’t forget to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already.

Thanks again, and I’ll see you in the following video!

Bye-bye!

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