What is quickbars?

QuickBars is an Android TV app that brings Home Assistant smart home controls to your television screen. The problem it solves: Home Assistant is a popular platform for controlling smart home devices like lights, thermostats, and cameras, but its interface is designed for phones and computers, not easy to navigate with a TV remote from across the room. QuickBars adds a fast overlay sidebar that can appear on top of whatever you are watching, giving you quick access to your most-used smart home controls without leaving your current app. You can map physical buttons on your TV remote, single press, double press, or long press, to trigger specific Home Assistant actions. It also shows live camera feeds as a picture-in-picture overlay while you watch TV, and supports rich notifications with images and action buttons optimized for TV screens. The connection to Home Assistant is made directly over your local network, so it does not require sending your data through a cloud service. The app was originally built so the creator's father could control smart home devices on a large screen with larger, easier to read controls. It has since been downloaded over 17,000 times. You would use this if you have a Home Assistant setup and want easy smart home control from your TV remote. It is written in Kotlin and available on the Google Play Store. Support and feature discussion happens through the project's Discussions page, with bug reports handled separately as GitHub issues. The project is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3, and the maintainer asks that all communication stay in English so the project remains manageable alongside their other full-time work and studies.