@Mathijs_1971 , your observations are quite valid.
Your not the first person to pose these concerns. I’ve seen a few business professionals (from large companies) come on this forum over the last year or so and essentially express the same concerns as yourself…
These concerns also worry me…
For Athom to survive long term and for them to successfully enter into the large global market (especially the US market) which they are now trying to do they REALLY need to “radically” revise how they structure their business and do things.
In my opinion they firstly need to have a very big review of all the apps on the platform (including their own) and have a huge clean up .
They need to bring the overall quality of all of the apps up to an acceptable consumer level and have a very big revision of everything and delete anything thats deemed crap or is “abandonware” which litters the platform.
BIG clean out…,
After I purchased my Homey Pro I was really disappointed to find many features (the reason I bought it) that were advertised ended up being garbage…
If Homey was just a free open source project by some users which you can download off the internet for free and flash onto a cheap €60 Raspberry Pi then these things wouldn’t be a problem. Hey it’s free., that’s what you get… 
In this scenario it would be quite reasonable for one to have low expectations on if things work properly, get weak support , have abandoned apps scattered all over the place etc etc … but what we a talking about here is a premium “high end” consumer grade product.
A very expensive one at that at (€370) … (Apple would even blush at this price). With Athom’s latest product (the bridge) you now have to pay them every month for your house to work for the rest of your life. (I’ll make a prediction this will be €4.99 within a couple of years).
You simply can not have a line up of expensive, high end, premium consumer grade products but run your business like a Hackey open source project. It is totally unworkable and is ultimately destined to fail.
In my opinion the main thing that “radically” needs to change is the relationship between Athom and it’s 3rd Party developers…
This is ultimately the main cause of all the quality issues with many of the apps on the platform. (overall) …
Not all apps are bad. There are some great 3rd party developers on here… (most mentioned in the earlier post). Most are essentially unpaid volunteer’s which go above and beyond in what they have to do. They donate their own time , have lots of responsibility, have to deal with customer enquires with little to no money or reward.
In my opinion the “no money or reward” part really needs to change. !
With no incentive system, unpaid workers, you will not get a quality product…
It’s simple economic’s…
Athom can’t continue selling high end consumer grade products and services (reaping all the profits from them) by using unpaid devs to make most of their apps and do most of their customer support for them.
You just end up with a poor platform and a bunch of pissed off unsatisfied dev’s. It’s an unworkable system…
There are probably a few alternative business models that Athom could undertake to remedy this.
One concept I personally think would work is if Athom basically setup a profit share system with all the dev’s.
There are various ways this could be done but essentially what ever Athom makes in profit (after their own costs) … eg paying staff , office space etc etc , a certain portion of the total profit (judged by a percentage ) should be pooled off into a seperate account and all dev’s receive a portion of that. No matter if your a big dev or a small one. All get a portion.
This creates incentive. The more Homey’s that Athom sell the bigger this portion gets, the bigger the cut to each dev. Creating an app now becomes a potential investment for a dev rather than an ongoing liability. They could receive potential ongoing payments for years and years. All they have to do is make sure the app works and keep it up to date. If they slack off or it turns into abandonware then they loose their position in the profit pool…
A self sustaining ecosystem base on incentive and reward…
Making good quality apps sells more Homeys. More Homeys means more share of the profit.
As to how the share of the profit pool is portioned between each dev would need some thought and would need to be debated. Eg what is the value of each app worth … etc etc Just based on installs ?
Does anyone have any thoughts on this . ??
If we are all going to be able to keep using Homey’s and have a system that works well and reliably unfortunately the business , money and corporate side of things really need to be addressed and fixed otherwise Athom will just end up like like most Kickstarters. Have a good idea or concept but end up going bankrupt due to a failed business model or incompetent directors of the company…
Russ
for all 3rd party / volunteer devs for creating and supporting such cool apps.
