I've spent a lot of time setting up Home Assistant exactly the way that I want. I've got the automations working. All the devices are connected to it, and the base dashboard itself isn't really a problem, but the problem starts after that. What I want is an iPad mounted in a central spot in the kitchen so I can quickly see cameras, check sensors, control lights, and glance at information without pulling out my phone every few minutes.

Sure, I could just pull up Home Assistant in a browser or open the Home Assistant app, and that works fine enough until you start noticing annoyances. I always need my phone on hand, or I need to create users, and it's just not solving the problem of quick access that I want.

What I want is a mounted tablet where I spend less time adjusting the experience and more time just using it. While there are plenty of such options on Android, I've struggled to find a good enough app for my iPad. That's until I installed DimDash. This app isn't just another dashboard system, nor does it ask me to rebuild anything. It takes the Home system dashboard that I've already set up and makes it work seamlessly on a permanently mounted screen.

DimDash fixes the things that make iPads frustrating as dashboards

Dimming and long-term access tokens improve the experience

Unlike many of the tools that we cover here, installing DimDash is basically like installing any other app from the iPad's app store. After installing it, the biggest thing that you'll notice is that you are no longer fighting with the lockdown nature of the iPad's hardware.

Before this, trying to use an iPad as a dedicated Home Assistant display felt like forcing it into a job it wasn't really designed for. You'd open the dashboard in Safari or maybe the Home Assistant app, tweak settings, and then discover that either the display didn't stay switched on or it wasn't really working the way you expected. You might want the display to dim down when not in use, but obviously Safari and the Home Assistant app don't offer that, but this app does.

The setup is straightforward: just point to the Home Assistant URL, select the Home Assistant integration template, and it's basically done. I like that the app supports multiple authentication methods, including Home Assistant long-lived access tokens. This means I don't have to worry about a wall-mounted dashboard suddenly dropping me back onto a login page. It might not affect my usage all that much, but when I have family members using the display just as much, I want to avoid as many inconveniences as possible.

The app also handles some of the visual cleanup that I would have done myself. For example, I can hide interface elements like headers and sidebars that might make sense on a desktop browser but not so much on a permanently mounted screen. All I want is the dashboard itself on display.

Adding to that is the dimming functionality, which is exceptionally useful and, in my opinion, critical to using any tablet as a dashboard. If you're leaving an iPad display on all day, brightness is an important factor. Yes, I want the display visible during the day, but I also don't want a glowing rectangle pulling away from my home's decor or even just my attention. The app automatically dims the display after a set period of inactivity and lets you adjust things like overlay opacity, fade duration, and idle timeouts.

More than just a control plane

Get the Pro for quality of life upgrades

When I originally set up DimDash on the iPad, I expected to just use it like a mounted dashboard for controlling things around the house, things like lights, activating scenes, checking cameras, and more. I obviously do all of that, but having access to my home assistant setup on a tablet means that I can also look at information with ease. Be it dedicated pages set for tracking room temperatures, camera feeds, media playback status, or even battery levels on critical devices. Instead of actively opening Home Assistant on my phone to check something, this information is just presented to me right in front of me, and that improves the experience quite a bit.

While I haven't needed to upgrade to the pro version of the app just yet, it unlocks quite a few features that a lot of users might find interesting. For example, upgrading to the pro version gives the app support for multiple dashboards and dashboard cycling, so you wouldn't need just one giant page packed with a lot of different cards trying to show you everything at once. You can have a dashboard for cameras, another for controls, and another for server and NAS monitoring, and the app will automatically rotate between these dashboards.

Upgrading to the pro version of the app also unlocks proximity monitoring, in which case the app will use the iPad's front camera and will automatically switch the display on when you walk over close to it. Depending on how you use your tablet and where you mount it, this could be quite a big quality of life upgrade.

Making Home Assistant easier for everyone at home

Look, depending on how you've set up your Home Assistant, you probably don't even need a dashboard. As a hobbyist, I think most people like me end up coming to this point where they do want a dashboard on their wall showing off their Home Assistant setup. Let's just call it a badge of honor for the work that we've put in.

More than that, building automations and connecting devices is only half the process. If your family members or even you are not very confident about giving access or control to automations, a tablet can be a great way to surface all of that information in a natural way. Yes, there are commercial products that can do the same for you, but let's be real. We're talking about self-hosting. We do prefer to build our own solutions.

DimDash takes your existing setup and the dashboard that you've built and fixes practical issues around it. After using it a while, I've basically stopped thinking about the app itself. It doesn't actually matter all that much. What matters, though, is the ease of use and convenience that it enables, and for that it is absolutely worth installing on your iPad.