Of all software I have ever used, for all disparate purposes (from Microsoft Word to vim to Hades (the video game) and beyond), Fully Kiosk Browser is the greatest piece of software I have ever had the pleasure of interacting with. I have never run into another piece of software that picks a specific problem and solves it so thoroughly and pleasantly and exactly in the way that helps me use it to solve that problem.

Let’s back up, what the hell am I talking about? Fully Kiosk Browser is an app for Android that turns that Android device into a “kiosk”. Think like the digital order menu in a fast food restaurant or a self checkout till at the supermarket. A single-purpose device that presents an interface and does only that task.

Fully Kiosk is a browser that you can point at a web page to provide that interface. I use it for my smart home, to provide a detailed interface for dealing with the more complex interactions/configurations you might need to use. (It’s important that it’s a fallback, not the default, for almost all typical actions, for more on that see my post about smart home design principles) In practice, it displays a floor plan of my house on one side, with various interactive elements, and on the other side it shows some information that requires my attention. I have a few Android tablets on the wall around my house that show these when you walk by.

But I’m not here to talk about my smart home dashboard itself (today). I’m here to tell you why I was so happy with Fully Kiosk Browser when setting the dashboards up.

Seamless usage

The first is that Fully does a great job of completely taking over Android. I don’t have any system UI or notifications or other Android fluff taking up space or interrupting my single-purpose displays. I occasionally see it fight with Android. A tablet restarts for an update or something and I see Fully wrestle back control and start displaying the dashboard again. I never have to intervene. Whenever I go to use it, it’s already available. It does a great job of guiding you through the settings to allow this to happen - deep linking into Android settings to make sure you give it the permissions it needs to manage the OS and double checking you’ve got it right (it’s surprisingly easy to go wrong with things like “just this time”).

It has various walk-up activation detection capabilities that are awesome. I use the camera motion sensor, where it uses the tablet’s selfie camera to detect motion (changing colors above a threshold) to turn itself on. Then it locks itself if there’s inactivity. Of course you can set it to not come on when it’s dark (so it doesn’t blind you at night). The end result of this is you just walk up to it and use it.

Configurable for what you want

Fully has an incredible number of configuration options that are all exactly the kinds of thing you’ll want to control for a single use device. Is the motion detection not working due to your lighting conditions? Turn it off. Do you want to run specific other apps in the background? There’s a list for that. Want to reload the web page it’s pointed at when it unlocks? Turn that on. The list goes on. Every one is useful somewhere and you can experiment to find the combination that works for your house.

And on top of all of that, you can manage it remotely. I don’t mean “there’s a cloud management dashboard you can pay for” or anything ridiculous like that. It’s a machine on your local network. You can go to its network address and configure it from your own PC (or your phone). If you’ve got more than one, you can even upload a config file. So you set up one, get it working like you want, then use its exact config for all the others. No needing to pore over settings again just to get them to match.

The different options are endless and I’ve only scratched the surface here. And for software like this, that is exactly what you need in order to make it truly do what you want. Because everybody is going to have extremely specific differences in how they want a single-purpose device like this to present itself.

Flexible in what it displays

Fully is browser, so any UI you can cram onto a web page can be what it presents.

Licensing costs that make sense

I think this is the real kicker. A lot of software is good at what it does. Fully really takes the cake because its license terms are actually reasonable. A license for a single device costs €7.90 (today, October 19th, 2025). That’s a perpetual license for that device. It’s quite reasonably priced. You can just buy it from their website.

The real kicker though, is that only some of the features require a license. And the ones that do still work without a license, it just shows a watermark on screen. The features are all fully functional without it. This means you can make sure it all works exactly as you want it to on your hardware before you buy. Not only that, when you go to buy the license in the app, it explicitly tells you this.

At least part of this is because a lot of Android hardware makers are bad digital citizens and lock out the user (you) from choosing what their own device does. Some things like taking over the OS are prevented, even if you want to do it. So Fully helps you find that out before you waste more money.

Of course, there is one small feature difference when you don’t have a full license and are using its features. The settings screen on the tablet/device are locked behind a keycode of your choice. If you’re using premium features but don’t have a license, that keycode screen also has a message that says something like: “The current passcode is XXXX, to hide this message please buy a license”, which, honestly, I thought was very funny and also very effective.

Is this an ad?

I keep writing and this does keep feeling more and more like an ad. I can only tell you that I don’t mean it to be. I just really love this software because it saved me so many headaches and let me make my smart home better. It makes all the right choices so that I can make the decisions I care about and not need to worry about the ones that I don’t.

I enjoy telling people about good things, and this is one of them. If you’ve got a smart home dashboard you want to display, Fully Kiosk Browser is the way to do it.