So Apple just announced their Homeview smart home controller (or whatever that thing is) along with “Apple Home Collection, a new line-up of smart home accessories” .
The intriguing part is “In collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric, Apple brings the simplicity, reliability, and privacy of iPhone and Apple Home to a new suite of smart cameras, thermostats, and a door lock. LG Video Doorbell, LG Floodlight Cam, LG Outdoor Cam, LG Indoor Cam.”
I’m really worried about Homey’s future at this point, knowing that LG owns 80% of Homey and will own 100% by July 2027. Once you’re in bed with Apple, you do as Apple says. If Apple has any future plans for a Homey like hardware, and LG is their partner… well… I just hope LG won’t do something stupid.
This was a project by a different division within LG. As we’ve mentioned quite a few times before, Homey operates independently, and we collaborate with LG where it makes sense for both sides.
For these new products, LG would need to go through the same process as any other partner, including getting them Works with Homey certified, for example
LG already owns 80% of Athom, and the agreement includes the acquisition of the remaining 20% within three years of the July 2024 deal. So by around July 2027, LG is expected to own Athom completely.
We all know that this can be a major benefit for Homey users: a larger development organisation behind it, more money to invest, access to LG’s manufacturing scale, partnerships, distribution and much more.
But the emphasis is clearly on can.
Large corporations like LG can put an enthusiastic team and substantial resources behind a project, but ultimately strategic and financial decisions are made at corporate level. And sometimes those decisions result in projects being changed, merged or simply discontinued, regardless of how enthusiastic the team behind them was.
So independence today is certainly positive, but 100% ownership by LG is still something worth keeping in mind.
Formally, yes — but for these particular products I think that is largely a formality.
LG is developing them specifically for Apple Home, and Apple states that every device in this new product line supports Thread. The lock, thermostats and sensors are also Matter compatible.
For those device categories, Matter over Thread is exactly the standard Homey supports as well. So their basic compatibility with Homey is not really in question.
Of course, Works with Homey certification is still a separate certification process. But that is very different from wondering whether the products will technically work with Homey at all.
Once LG owns 100% of Homey, the founders and staff may still run the company operationally, but they are no longer the owners and ultimately no longer control its strategic direction.
What Athom did is actually what many successful startups eventually do. At some point you reach an awkward stage: too large to remain a small company with limited staff and resources, but still too small to compete financially with the big players. Selling at a good valuation can be a very rational way out.
And that can work extremely well.
But history also shows the other side. Large companies sometimes decide years later that an acquisition no longer fits their strategy, that it should be absorbed into another platform, fundamentally changed, or simply written off. SmartThings is an example of how much a platform can change after acquisition.
A new partnership or strategic agreement with another Big Tech company could also change the priorities very quickly.
I’m not predicting that this will happen to Homey. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I genuinely hope Homey continues successfully for many years.
I’m only saying that once ownership is completely transferred, the long-term future is ultimately determined by LG’s corporate strategy, not by the people who originally created Homey.
And in the end, that’s pure speculation on your end, of course
Yes, technically we’ll be 100% owned by LG, but I don’t think you have much insight into how things are actually arranged behind the scenes.
It’s pretty simple, really. LG acquired a company that was already profitable and doing well on its own. They didn’t buy us because we needed saving. You could see it as an investment in an already successful business.
And like with any investment, the goal is to get something out of it, whether that’s profit, growth or strategic value. So LG has every reason to want Homey to continue doing well.
Of course, that doesn’t mean things can never change. But why would you invest in a successful company only to start messing with the things that made it successful in the first place? That would be a pretty awkward way to see your investment go nowhere. And I think we’ve shown that we are still here and investing in the platform we all love.
That’s true, but strategic value doesn’t necessarily mean keeping the acquired product alive or continuing its development as an independent platform. What is good for the investor is not necessarily good for the existing customers.
There are quite a few examples of this. Apple acquired Dark Sky and Texture, eventually shutting down both services while integrating their technology into its own ecosystem. The technology survived, but the original independent products disappeared.
Samsung’s acquisition of Harman is another interesting example. Harman owned AKG, a highly respected audio brand. Following the closure of AKG’s Vienna facilities, much of the original development team left and some former employees founded Austrian Audio to continue their work. Meanwhile, AKG-branded consumer products increasingly became part of Samsung’s own product strategy, with product technology that, in my opinion as a longtime AKG fan, no longer reflects what made AKG special. The brand survived, but much of its original identity and engineering heritage did not.
Another example is Sunmachine, a German company developing innovative pellet-powered Stirling engine heating systems. Its has been acquired, but the original technology never successfully returned to the market. The intention was to eliminate a competitor.
The point is that an acquisition can be financially or strategically successful for the buyer even if the original product disappears, loses its identity, or is absorbed into the buyer’s own ecosystem. Sometimes the value lies in the technology, patents, engineering expertise, customer base, or even the removal of a potential competitor.
I’m certainly not suggesting that LG bought Homey with such intentions, and I sincerely hope Homey continues to thrive for many years. But saying that LG has every reason to keep Homey successful because it invested money in it overlooks an important distinction: LG has every reason to make its investment successful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean preserving Homey as the independent, manufacturer-neutral smart home platform we know and appreciate today.
They also took over Soundcraft, which made high quality live audio products. Development of new products came to an hold for some years. Recently they released “new” products which are not Soundcraft worthy. The brand is as good as dead.
Ok, so bottomline, some things outside of your control happen in life.
It’s up to you to prepare for it if you deem it necessary. Either let it happen when it happens or decide on an exit strategy.
It is not owned by a commercial company. Development is overseen by the Swiss non-profit Open Home Foundation, together with a large contributor community.
The Foundation owns the Home Assistant name, logo and trademarks, but it does not own the source code in the same proprietary sense. Home Assistant Core is released under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.
So if the Foundation were ever to disappear — which I certainly don’t hope — the code would still be available. Anyone could fork it and continue development under a different name.
That is exactly the kind of long-term independence I want from a system that controls my home.
Edit: As another layer of independence, I use almost exclusively Matter devices. If I ever move to another platform, I can keep the devices instead of replacing the whole ecosystem.
I learned that lesson once, which is why I basically banned Zigbee from my home.
Matter is platform-independent and does not rely on vendor-specific apps or drivers in the same way. That gives me another exit path: even if I change the controller, most of the hardware can stay.
I wonder: if this is a key factor in determining which smart home platform you use, why did you go for the Homey platform? Regardless of who their shareholders were and are, the Homey platform was never open source.
If LG wanted a platform that only worked with LG appliances, they wouldn’t have bought us in the first place. A big part of Homey’s value is precisely that we’re a neutral platform, bringing together hundreds of different manufacturers, including LG’s “competitors”.
That neutrality is also what makes Homey valuable to LG. It gives them a way to connect with an entire ecosystem of third-party manufacturers. Take our recent addition of brands like Hisense to the Works with Homey partnership program, for example. That would have been a lot harder to pull off if we were called LG Homey.
I completely understand your reasoning, and I don’t even doubt that what you describe is true today.
My point is simply that Athom no longer has full control over its own long-term future. Ultimately, that control belongs to a much larger company.
And large corporations are known to make decisions that may look completely unreasonable from the perspective of one product, brand or community if they believe they can create more value elsewhere.
That doesn’t mean LG will interfere with Homey or change its direction. But nobody at Athom can really guarantee that it won’t happen either.
Keeping the Homey name and giving Athom operational independence today is certainly positive — it just isn’t the same thing as being independent.
I agree. I did not choose Homey because I was looking for an open-source smart home platform.
I loved Advanced Flows, and I thought Homey would be the better long-term platform for my family if one day I was no longer able to maintain the system myself. It seemed like a very good middle ground between ultimate flexibility and ease of use.
But over time I made two important observations.
First, even with Advanced Flows, my family is not really able to understand the complex logic behind my automations. Of course I could limit myself to very simple automations, but then I could almost just use Apple Home.
Second, I had many Matter and Thread outages with Homey. Support repeatedly pointed towards problems in my own environment, but didn’t really help me find the cause. Today I understand one reason much better: Homey simply does not expose the level of diagnostic information and debugging tools needed to analyse these kinds of problems properly.
That was actually why I installed Home Assistant in the first place: as a parallel system with much better logging, traces and diagnostic tools.
But I also have to admit that manually cross-referencing logs, traces, events and entity states is not exactly easy either. AI helped me enormously there. Once Claude had read access to Home Assistant through MCP, I was able to solve several problems that would have been extremely difficult for me to diagnose manually.
During that process I also discovered how powerful the combination of AI and Home Assistant can be.
Today Claude can build complete automations for me. I am still the architect: I define what the system should do, the rules, the limits and the overall structure. But Claude can implement and analyse it.
And strangely enough, that has now become my new long-term strategy for my family.
Together with Claude I wrote a paper explaining how to create an AI account, create a project, connect it through MCP and give it the necessary instructions. Most of the important instructions and documentation live inside the Home Assistant project itself, so the AI project only needs a few initial instructions.
From there, my family could use their own account and simply explain in normal language what they want to change.
I also document fixed procedures for common tasks. Replacing a device is one example: the AI guides them through pairing the replacement, reads the old entity names, removes the old device, assigns the previous entity IDs where appropriate, and verifies that the existing automations still reference the correct entities.
Those procedures, instruction files and limitations are intentionally AI-independent. If Claude disappears or another AI becomes better in the future, the documentation and architecture remain usable.
And coming back to the original open-source question: that was not why I chose Home Assistant.
It is something I appreciated only later.
But today I see it as an important additional advantage, because it gives my family the best chance of still having a maintainable and usable smart-home system many years after I am no longer the person maintaining it.
Sorry I wasn’t available at the time to assist you with those negotiations.
No, what I mean is that HiSense certainly isn’t naive enough to enter such a partnership without knowing about the LG acquisition.
So whether the product is called Homey or LG Homey, and whether Athom is presented as operating independently, is largely a marketing question.
If LG ownership had been a real blocking point for HiSense, I doubt the deal would have happened at all.
I’m quite sure their legal and marketing teams understood perfectly well who owns Athom and what the LG–Homey relationship looks like before signing anything.
Edit: Mayby LG sells Homey one day to HiSense, or maybe Apple acquires LG
Seriously? That’s exactly what big companies with deep pockets do. They don’t care about the brand or its users, they want the IP, technology, and talent.
Google bought Nest, killed the independent Nest app ecosystem, and phased out original hardware to put its own voice assistant and AI first.
Apple bought Dark Sky, pulled it from the Android store immediately, and eventually shut down the iOS app entirely to merge the backend tech into Apple Weather.
Broadcom bought VMware, killed all perpetual licenses, terminated partner programs, and axed over 40 standalone products to force massive price hikes.
Intel bought Altera, completely starved it of its core hardware identity, caused its revenue to collapse, and eventually had to sell off operational control at a massive multibillion dollar loss.
HP bought Palm to challenge Apple and Android. Within just 16 months, following disastrous hardware rollouts, HP completely killed the Palm brand, axed all webOS smartphones and tablets, and abandoned the software framework entirely.
General Motors bought Saab, they immediately forced Saab to abandon its safety first engineering, forced it to build cars on generic Chevrolet/Subaru platforms, alienated its core fan base, and pushed it into bankruptcy during a restructuring.
That’s my biggest concern with Homey, that LG has its own “plans” and “vision”. And partnering with Apple to give HomeKit/Apple Home a boost through new LG hardware doesn’t exactly give me confidence that LG has its smart home priorities with Homey.
