They didn’t stop making awesome cars though, they took the shit GM gave them and put a crown on it. And that’s coming from a Saab driver.
But all jokes aside, I would recommend everyone to have another listen of the podcast episode I did together with Kyle after we just got acquired. That gives the most transparant look into why LG acquired us and what their plans are.
Plans can change. Companies can change 
Sure, and I could just as easily give you examples where the exact opposite happened compared to the list shared above. Amazon acquired eero, Signify acquired WiZ despite already owning Philips Hue, and Microsoft acquired GitHub without turning it into a Microsoft-exclusive platform.
I think the point is that you can find examples of acquisitions going both ways. Some work out great, others don’t. But I don’t think looking at a handful of acquisitions that went wrong really tells us much about how this particular one will play out.
And to circle back to the original discussion, I don’t really see how LG working together with Apple on a range of HomeKit products would suggest anything about Homey’s future independence.
LG is a massive company with different divisions, products and partnerships. They already work with plenty of companies that compete with them in other areas. If anything, this partnership with Apple shows that LG understands the value of working together with other ecosystems rather than trying to keep everything within its own.
And that’s also where I think the value of Homey comes in. LG already has ThinQ, so if they simply wanted another platform exclusively for LG appliances, there wouldn’t have been much point in acquiring us. A big part of what makes Homey valuable is precisely that we’re a neutral platform bringing together hundreds of different manufacturers, including direct competitors of LG.
Of course nobody knows exactly what things will look like in 5 or 10 years, and I’m not claiming otherwise. But I think there’s quite a difference between acknowledging that acquisitions can change over time and assuming that LG working with Apple somehow means Homey is heading in that direction.
To be honest, Github has become a sh*tshow under Microsoft.
Funny you mentioned ThinQ. I use around 30 “brand” apps with Homey, and the official ThinQ is hands down the worst one of them all. 90% of the time it just doesn’t work with my washer/dryer. Lucky there’s a community app that does work.
Sure. But then let’s use LG itself as the example.
Take Alphonso.
When LG acquired a controlling stake in Alphonso in January 2021, the official announcement said that Alphonso would continue:
“as an independent business under its current brand and leadership.”
That sounds remarkably similar to what is being said about Athom today.
Less than two months later, Alphonso was already being presented as LG Ad Solutions. The Alphonso legal entity still exists (LG owned and license holder), so saying the company literally disappeared would be incorrect, but the independent Alphonso brand certainly did.
That is exactly my point.
I am not saying that LG will turn Homey into “ThinQ+” in five years. I am saying that today’s reassuring statements about independence and branding are not guarantees of what LG will decide tomorrow.
And LG would not even have to destroy the value Athom created. Quite the opposite: the partnerships, integrations, knowledge and technology could all remain extremely valuable while gradually becoming part of a wider LG ecosystem.
That is how acquisitions often create their value.
I have some professional experience with this world as well. I was project manager for a startup house created by an institution representing established companies.
At first sight you might ask: why would established businesses help create potential future competitors?
Because most startups never become serious competitors. And when one does develop something genuinely valuable and starts attracting attention, acquisition often becomes a very attractive outcome for both sides.
For the startup founders, selling at a good price can be far more rational than trying to fight a much larger company with vastly greater financial, marketing and distribution resources.
For the large company, acquiring an existing team, technology and product can be faster and cheaper than developing the same capabilities internally from scratch.
That is simply part of how modern technology development works.
I agree that nobody can know it exactly.
But I don’t believe that LG acquired Athom without a fairly detailed multi-year strategic plan, and I would be very surprised if Athom did not have a good idea of at least the direction of that plan.
LG itself described the acquisition as a cornerstone of its AI Home business and explicitly talked about combining Athom’s open smart-home platform with LG technology.
So my scepticism doesn’t come from believing that anyone is lying today.
It comes from knowing that today’s plan, today’s independence and today’s branding are ultimately subject to the strategy of the company that owns Athom.
And Alphonso is a very good LG-specific example of how quickly such a strategy can evolve.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if initiatives such as SHS eventually provide LG with valuable real-world experience for bringing more of Homey’s technology and concepts onto LG hardware. But that last part is obviously my interpretation, not something I can prove.
That is the distinction I am trying to make.
Apple has no need for a multi-protocol hub featuring Zigbee, Z-Wave, 433 MHz, community apps, etc. For LG, a multi-protocol hub is likely valuable, but within an Apple structure this would remain questionable. So what if …
With a market capitalisation of roughly $5 trillion, Apple is more than 200 times larger than LG. An acquisition of Athom/Homey by Apple would therefore be financially trivial: compared with LG, Athom is a small Dutch software and hardware manufacturer.
There are several ways in which Apple could acquire Athom/Homey from LG. If it ever did, plausible scenarios would include:
Apple runs into a technical challenge that Athom addresses far more effectively than Apple can achieve internally.
Apple executes an acqui-hire or asset deal: the team, patents, components of the Homey OS, and possibly selected staff move to Apple.
LG retains the ThinQ brand and its hardware business, while the independent Homey product line is discontinued.
This is Apple’s usual approach to acquire small teams and specific technologies: not to continue the product as it exists, but to absorb the expertise and intellectual property into its own platforms.
Well, this escalated from 0 to 100 real quick. Trust me, let me burst the “Apple is buying Homey” bubble right away 
My text is a “So what if…” It is about uncertainty and possibility; it opens a conditional space.
Your reactions on this topic, Abe, tend to pretend to more certainty than your feet - and Athom’s - could possibly bear. To put it simply: you do not know what you do not know. You might try thinking in possibilities.
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LLM’s are known for generating nonsense 
@Doekse
I also think this discussion is escalating a bit. 
I don’t think it is correct to assume that Apple could have no interest in Homey at all.
Apple’s newly announced smart-home products still follow the typical Apple philosophy: keep things simple, focus heavily on Matter and Thread, and hide as much technical complexity as possible from the user.
At the same time, Apple is clearly moving closer to what Amazon and Google have been doing for years, with smart displays, speakers and central home-control devices. And Siri is finally becoming considerably more capable — at least for those of us outside the EU.
Where Apple Home still falls short, in my opinion, is complex automation.
You can already build surprisingly complex things with third-party software and Shortcuts, but let’s be honest: that is far from an elegant solution.
And this is actually the only part of Homey where I could imagine Apple seeing something genuinely interesting: Advanced Flow.
The concept fits Apple’s philosophy remarkably well. It hides complex logic behind a very visual, user-friendly interface.
Today, Apple Home basically offers simple automations. Tomorrow, it could have a visual flow engine that allows much more complex logic without exposing the user to programming.
That is pure speculation, of course.
But if Apple ever had an interest in Homey, I don’t necessarily think it would be interested in Homey as a complete smart-home platform. It might only be interested in specific technology or intellectual property.
That could theoretically happen through an acquisition from LG, but it could just as well happen through cooperation, licensing or the sale of one particular technology.
And if such a deal became financially attractive enough, it could also be a very good deal for LG.
In the end, once enough money is involved, almost every structure becomes negotiable.
I don’t fully agree with that framing.
LLMs can certainly generate nonsense, but they are also heavily influenced by how the user frames the question.
If you ask:
“How could Apple acquire Homey?”
you are already pushing the model towards constructing a scenario in which such an acquisition happens, and you may well get speculative nonsense back.
If instead you ask:
“Could Apple be interested specifically in Homey’s Advanced Flow technology, and could buying or licensing that technology make strategic sense?”
then you are much more likely to get an answer similar to the argument I made.
So in the end, a lot depends on the human asking the questions and on how those questions are formulated.
My own forum replies are corrected with an LLM as well, but I give it very clear rules:
Translate or correct my text into proper English.
Verify factual claims I make.
If something is questionable, ask me what I want to do.
Otherwise, do not substantially change my argument or invent a different one.
So the LLM is not creating my opinion. It is mainly helping me express it more clearly and checking whether the factual basis holds up.
But Advanced Flow isn’t a unique, or licensable, technology. In the home automation context, Node-RED has done something similar for a long time now. In a broader context, flow-based programming has existed for decades.
Implementation-wise, it’s not exceptionally complex, and Homey’s implementation will be tailored to Homey itself.
True, but compared with Node-RED and the various C.A.F.E. forks, I think Advanced Flow is extremely well executed.
It may be tightly integrated with Homey, but an acquisition would not only buy the finished product. It would also buy the code, the architecture, the UX concepts and, perhaps most importantly, the people and knowledge behind it.
The web interface is presumably largely built with standard web technologies, so at least parts of the implementation and many of the concepts should be portable. Apple would obviously adapt it to its own architecture and design language rather than simply dropping the Homey interface into Apple Home unchanged.
And there is another factor: Apple is currently trying to strengthen its position in the smart-home market, where Amazon and Google have had a head start for years. If Apple wants to close that gap, it has little incentive to spend several years reinventing technology that already exists in a mature and proven form.
And that is really my broader point: large technology companies often prefer acquiring a mature, proven implementation and the team behind it instead of spending years developing an equivalent solution internally from scratch.
So the fact that Advanced Flow is tailored to Homey does not necessarily make the technology or the know-how behind it uninteresting to another company.
Yes indeed, Pascal, and that is exactly why I find this topic very interesting, especially because the relationship between market and technology is highly complex. It is always interesting to share thoughts on that. The view from technology towards the market - what we see/read a lot on this forum - leads to different assumptions than the view in the other direction.
I actually think Advanced Flow could be interesting from both directions — technology towards the market and market towards technology.
From the technology side, it is a very mature and user-friendly implementation of something Apple Home is still rather weak at: complex automation without making the user deal with programming.
From the market side, Apple is clearly making a much stronger push into the smart-home space now and does not have unlimited time to catch up with Amazon and Google.
The more interesting question is whether Apple even knows Homey well enough.
Homey has historically been much stronger in Europe than in the US, so it may simply never have been particularly visible to Apple before. But the LG acquisition was a fairly high-profile deal, and today Apple is already cooperating directly with LG on smart-home products. So it is at least conceivable that Homey and its technology have appeared on Apple’s radar through that relationship.
That still doesn’t mean Apple would want Homey as a platform.
My speculation is much narrower: they could potentially be interested in the concept, technology and know-how behind Advanced Flow.
And there is another interesting change at Apple: John Ternus is now CEO. Unlike Tim Cook, whose background was strongly rooted in operations, Ternus comes directly from engineering and hardware development.
That doesn’t mean he will suddenly make every decision from a purely technical perspective, of course. But it could influence how Apple evaluates technologies that help it close gaps more quickly.
Apple has clearly decided to take the smart-home market more seriously. Whether that leads to Homey technology, something completely different, or another series of wrong decisions is something none of us knows.
But I don’t think the idea that Apple could be interested in one specific part of Homey’s technology is particularly far-fetched.
Indeed …
Interesting times, … and we look forward to following the developments. Thank you for your contribution to this topic. I read it with both pleasure and interest.
