Android kiosk for any web page
Muralis turns an Android tablet into a wall panel for any web page: a dashboard, a board, a menu, a page on your own network. It holds the screen on that page, recovers by itself, and takes commands over HTTP and MQTT.
Who it is for
Muralis does not care what is on the page. If a browser can show it, a tablet on the wall can hold it.
Home Assistant, openHAB, ioBroker, Domoticz. To Muralis they are all a page.
A Grafana board, a build monitor, a ticket queue, on the wall of the room that needs it.
A welcome screen, a menu, today’s schedule, on a tablet nobody has to babysit.
An intranet page or a local server. Nothing has to be on the internet.
What it does
Wall panels drift. A browser stops repainting, a network blip leaves an error page, an update reboots into the stock launcher. Muralis handles each of those without anyone walking over.
Home app, lock task, no system UI to reach. Back by itself after a reboot.
Failed loads retry, hung loads time out, a dead renderer is rebuilt.
A page that was updating and stopped is reloaded. One that never changes is left alone.
A full restart in the small hours, and a rebuild whenever memory runs low.
Three to twelve corner taps, recorded on the device. Nothing is hardcoded.
A real screen-off where the tablet can be trusted to sleep, a black film where it cannot. It says which.
Dimmed page, black film, another page, or pictures: your folders in playlists, or a picture of the day, credited.
Remote control, Pro
The web admin is a page the panel serves itself. The same commands and settings answer over HTTP and MQTT, and the reference shows each one with the panel’s real reply.
Muralis
curl -k -u :your-admin-password -X POST https://192.0.2.42:8080/api/command \
-d cmnd=kiosk.open_url \
-d url=https://muralis.spazio17.orgThe panel answers:
{"status":"accepted","detail":""}In motion
Recorded over the cable. They loop, there is no sound, and nothing in them is a mock-up.
The page fails and nobody touches the tablet. About ten seconds later the panel loads the configured page again by itself. The waiting runs at five times speed, and the badge counts the real seconds as they pass.
Five taps in one corner opens the settings. You choose the corners on the device, and the page underneath carries on as if nothing happened.
A POST to the panel’s own web admin and it changes page, with nobody near it. The reply under the command is the panel’s own.
curl -k -u :your-admin-password -X POST https://192.0.2.42:8080/api/command \
-d cmnd=kiosk.open_url \
-d url=https://muralis.spazio17.orgOne message on the panel’s command topic. It does as it is told and answers on its own result topic.
mosquitto_pub -h test.mosquitto.org \
-t kiosk/hallway-panel/command \
-m '{"command":"kiosk.open_url","args":{"url":"https://muralis.spazio17.org"}}'Screens
For Home Assistant users
Over MQTT the panel appears in Home Assistant as one device, with no YAML: sensors for battery, memory, storage and temperature, controls for brightness, orientation, display off and the page, buttons for reload, restart and reboot. The two recipes below are ready-made automations built on them. Import one and Home Assistant asks you which entities to use.
Needs Pro
A panel that glows all night is a nightlight nobody asked for. This wakes the screen when someone is in the room and blanks it again once the room has been empty for a while. The page stays loaded and comes straight back.
It asks you for
Needs Pro
A tablet left plugged in forever sits at 100 percent and warms up, and after a year or two the battery swells and lifts the screen off the front. This charges it only between two thresholds instead. The panel keeps running throughout; only the charger is switched.
It asks you for
Both read the panel’s own entities, so both need Pro. Home Assistant imports blueprints from GitHub rather than from any website, which is why the buttons above hand it the repository and not this page.
Free, and Pro
A panel on a wall is meant to be left alone, and the kiosk does that for free. Pro is how you reach it anyway: a browser, a broker or an automation, without walking up to it.
Free
Everything that makes a tablet a wall panel. Not a trial, not a cut-down edition.
€4.99 once*
* Before tax.
The remote surfaces. Worth it if the panel should be one more thing you can reach from your desk; irrelevant if you want a page on a wall.
Muralis is in closed testing on Google Play, and nothing is on sale yet: the price and the split above are the plan, not a shop. A panel that never buys Pro is never nagged and never stops working.
Install
They are not the same. Only the QR makes a locked panel; the app from Play is for trying it.
Muralis owns the tablet and holds the screen on your page. Android grants that only during setup, which is why the tablet has to be reset first.
A tablet that cannot verify the code’s signing fingerprint refuses to go on. What the code encodes, and how to check it, is on the download page.
The app only. No lockdown, nothing is wiped: Android grants ownership during setup and never after. Good for seeing what it does before you reset a tablet.
In closed testing: the link opens only for accounts on the tester list.
Requirements
| Android | 8.0 (API 26) or newer. |
|---|---|
| Install | An ordinary APK. No root, no platform signature. |
| Full kiosk | Needs device owner, over adb or by QR at setup. |
| Without it | Still runs and recovers. System UI stays reachable, reboot and real screen-off unavailable. |
| Battery settings | Two switches Android keeps for you. How to set them. |
| Google account | Only to buy Pro. |
| The page | Any web page, on the internet or on your own network. |
| Broker | Only for MQTT. Unencrypted, so trusted networks only. |
Availability
Runs on real panels every day. On Google Play in closed testing, and published in full on the download page.
Closed testing. The Play link opens only for accounts on the tester list. The download page has the same APK, signed by Google, together with its checksum, its signing certificate and the provisioning QR, for anyone who wants to check it or make a panel with it today.