[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bakaselwatsch:
Hey guys,

I'm not really sure if this is the right place to post this question but as I don't really know where else in the web I could find help on this I'll give it a try :)

TL;DR:​

Do you know any (and I really mean any - including writing an app or other hands on approaches) method to have a permanent (tabbed) navigation at the bottom of the screen to switch between apps or websites/PWAs?

The background of this question:​

I'm coming down a long road trying to hack together a DIY - privacy focused - smart speaker - mainly to switch lights and play some music. I started off back in 2018/19 and found snips.ai one of the most promising FOSS smart speaker projects for my plans and so I got me a Raspberry Pi 3b+ and a Matrix Voice board as foundation. Then half a year I later, when I found the time to put those together, I had to find out, that Sonos just bought snips.ai and their services were to be shut down...

Since then I had a long pause on this but always followed the development of FOSS voice projects including Mycroft (to expensive HW, to bloated, to tied to their web services IMHO), Sepia (to complicated to setup) as well as attempts on hacking OTS speakers like Alexa, Google Home, Sonos et al or combinations with web controllable wifi speakers like Teufel 3sixty (which is really a gold speaker but as tons of other radios has a frontier chip set with its awkward web interface) or even the awesome Squeezelite-ESP32 project. Lately I stumbled upon Rhasspy and got myself together to give my project a new try and was even kind of successful (got a self hosted voice assistant doing what I want - even if I had to learn and write some python here and there). But I figured out that 1) a smart speaker without a display is not really what I want and 2) I'm not really that kind of maker guy to 3d-print cases, plan and build circuitry and what not - or it's just missing me the time to do and especially experimenting on this :(

So I ended up with the idea of the software that I need (Rhasspy server side + a satellite app, Home Assistant, Logitech Media Server, Spotify/Tidal and maybe some others) and was then looking for some hackable device to serve as interface to that (display, speakers, microphone, wifi + maybe bluetooth). The Sonoff NSPanel Pro was a candidate but I didn't trust the quality of its speakers and read some reviews that were claiming a weak performance. Then I found the Lenovo ThinkSmart View that has all this and this XDA thread and immediately got me a new one for 60 bucks. Now I have a quality device better then I could ever make it with a blank(though not rooted) android, a Rhasspy Voice Assistant running on a local server ready to receive and send audio streams, a promising app to act as a Rhasspy satellite and some quality speakers to play music on. The last opponent I'm facing now is a nice UI on android that can bring all the bits together.

What I'm looking for now is a free (and ideally OSS) panel/kiosk solution with that I can seamlessly switch between Home Assistant (web UI), Spotify (web UI or their app) and some others like a self hosted Web music player. In my imagination I could switch between them with a permanent tab bar at the screen bottom but am open to other ideas. I'm not an Android developer but I consider myself a stable Java dev open to write an own app for this - I'd just need a starting point (read of Webviews, Custom Tabs, Trusted Web Activities but found them not really a solution to what I need - maybe is there some browser which's contents I can just include in an app?). Also I can write (progressive) web apps and do stuff with them but then AFAIK the only method to embed remote sites would be iframes which likely won't work with at least spotify).

I really do not want to bloat this forum with all that stuff - I'm just writing this in the hope that 1) someone is interested in this and maybe is on the same journey and 2) to give some context on my actual question above :)

Thank you very much in advance!