Evaluating Homey Pro Mini

Questions & Help
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Hey I’m looking at potentially moving from Google Home to the Homey ecosystem. Over all Homey looks really good, and I would prefer a more plug and play solution than Home Assistant.

My smart home is exclusively Matter + Thread devices, so had a few questions before I pull the trigger:

  • How engaged is Athom, do they respond to users, fix bugs that are reported and such? This is by far the worst part of Google Home, just zero feed back, nothing ever gets fixed, no updates on if/when something might get implemented
  • How well does syncing to another ecosystem like Google Home work? I’ve got google home speakers that it’d still be nice to use for running tasks like turning lights on/off
  • It sounds like Homey is still only on Matter 1.2? Has there been any official indications they are working on an update? 1.4 was released over 6 months ago, and they aren’t on 1.3 yet. Which doesn’t bode well I think.
  • Does anyone have an specific experience with Thread & Matter, how well is it supported? I saw at one point you couldn’t add matter devices directly, I assume that’s been solved now?
  • This one is sort of out of left field, but has there been any word of a new Bridge device that has Ethernet for back-haul, and a Thread radio? I’ve got a detached building that I’d love to get some thread support in.

Thanks in advance!

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Welcome here!

Just my point of view. I started with a Homey Pro 2019 in 2020, and started using Home Assistant next to it after a while, just out of curiosity at first. Now it handles lots of my devices. I also bought a second Pro 2019.

Depends on what problem you have with which device or which Homey parts.
Some bugs can exist for a long time (10+ years), other bugs sometimes get fixed within a day.
Reported vulnerabilities are patched pretty quick.

I praise the team for skipping wifi on the Pro mini. Search the forum for “offline” to get my point.

They are very lucky with this active community, heck, even Support recommends to start here instead of reporting an issue. But, we can’t fix Homey firmware / hardware obviously.

Did you check HA out recently?
It’s way more plug & play than Homey imho!
The mandatory ‘configure by yaml only’ days are from the past.

Just fyi, or non-Matter devices it can be tricky:
With Homey you have to really dig through the homey.app store to find out if some device is supported, with or without external hubs.
And, when there’s an app for a specific brand, this doesn’t mean all their smart devices are supported by default.

This is not applicable for compatible Matter enabled devices. One problem, Homey only accepts certified Matter devices, unlike Home Assistant and others.
This is a questionable choice imho, limiting your choice of Matter devices big time.

It works reasonably well, it’s not lighning fast. You can start flows (automations) or any Google supported device by voice. Recently it became possible to have selected devices synced with Ghome.
There’s text to speech apps as well.

Pro 2023: yes
Pro mini:

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Don’t buy Homey when you want / need the latest and greates now.
Here HA is the better / best choice.

Homey doesn’t support Thread, only Matter-over-Thread and Matter-over-(W)LAN.
The Pro mini is just released, not sure if anyone has experience already.

Not to my knowledge. There isn’t even zigbee or z-wave bridged over (W)LAN functionality (yet).

Oh, and Homey Pro is not an 100% local device. It needs the Athom cloud to authenticate every other 2 weeks.
If that moment happens to be now, you can’t reach Homey anymore when internet is down.
And when Athom (cloud) quits, Homey becomes a brick basically, which keeps running it’s programmed automations as a black box.

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wow thank you for the great reply!

yeah it sounds like maybe a Home Assistant Yellow might be the right choice for me, thanks!

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You should know better than to trust Athom’s marketing material, Peter :wink: Homey only supports some Matter 1.3 functionality (mostly stuff relevant to parent company LG).

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Yes, they’re good :face_with_peeking_eye::joy: hehehe. I must say it puzzled me a bit why the Pro23 isn’t running Matter v1.3 in this case.

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It’s probably just an oversight, I’m fairly sure that the Big and Mini Pro are running very similar firmware and will support the same Matter devices.

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Yup, both run the same firmware

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