Homey – After a Few Months, I Think It’s a Scam

Off-Topic
21

I respect your opinion, and I’m sure that as a veteran of this forum you know far more than I do. I’m simply saying that I don’t believe calling the Athom team “scammers” is fair or accurate.

That triggered me - also Dijker ‘s “bashing Homey and or HA is the only thing I guess we are going to close.”

that is why you see only little topics on this forum about discontent users; they are either smothered or even deleted - and discontent users are completely overthrown by the advocates and disciples of Homey that you are not allowed to be negative, only positive solutions count.

So much of free speech on here.

I am an ex Homey owner and i was greatly disappointed by it’s reliability too.

I now have Home Assistant and that is not perfect either - correct - especially the user friendlyness of home assistant is real problematic if you are not full-flash-IT-nerd 3.0.

I think a lot of home automation is still immature, where standards are developing and companies still go with isolated ecosystems.

The biggest problem with Atom Homey is the attitude of the company - to make shiny sales leaflets and not seem to give a poop about system limitations, especially not admid they exist, nor solve them. That is disturbing and arrogant.

For many other systems and the user-friendlyness , I have my hopes on artificial intelligence, so I can just verbally tell my home automation system; “Hey, make it your routine to turn off the bathroom fan only 30 minutes after somebody has been there but shut the light after one minute” and it’s sorting out itself what devices it needs and do all the nerdy stuff under the hood.

i am still to make this video of me hammering my homey pro to pieces. it’s somewhere under dust, out of service. some day…

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22

Me too. I run many things on my Homey Pro, it has been running smoothly, no problems, no lag, no hickups. Lights, airco, lawnmower, weather, window shutters, sun screens, carport.

If you have difficulty programming flows, or they do not work, then it is due to you not being able to properly program. Programming is not easy, although many think they are pro’s.

It is of no use bashing Homey. Ofcourse people that have difficulties find in this thread others with difficulties. So easy to blame the system. Blame yourself first!

I must say, that on wifi, I experienced problems in the beginning. But after changing to wired lan, I have had no issues whatsoever.

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23

Please read the thread carefully. Most issues are not related to people having a problem with “programming” flows, they have issues with Homey’s unreliability. That’s not user error.

Case in point: my HP2023 basically does nothing, I only have it for app development. It consistently hangs after a week or two. Doing nothing. Then I have to reboot it again, and that usually results in a “breathing red” LED, which means it crashed (during startup). After some time, it will work again. That’s just so unreliable that I’m glad I don’t use it for anything important. And it’s of no surprise to me that many people reboot their Homey daily to keep it running.

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24

There are many things that can crash a system. Any apps installed? Trusted ones, or? Any flows that cause memory to fill up? WiFi connection problems…it is too easy to blame it all on Homey.

25

Can’t you read? This Homey is doing nothing. Literally. No flows, almost no apps, it’s connected over Ethernet, etc.

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26

Can you read? Mine is doing lots of things, and it never crashes.

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27

That goes to show how unreliable it is :man_shrugging:t3:

28

Or how defective your’s is…

Sounds like Windows computers, some work nearly flawless, and some crash several times a day.

But if Homey is that bad, I wonder why you’re still around and do “app development”….

Seriously, I would have moved on..

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29

Yes, mine is the only one for which this happens /s

I have, many years ago, to a system that’s rock-solid (Home Assistant). But my app development was (partially) “funded” by Homey users so I’m just being a nice person.

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30

I’m not saying that, and beeing sarcastic doesn’t do anything for me in a discussion…

31

I just get a bit sarcastic when people are trying to tell me my Homey is broken (it’s not, it’s rooted and there’s nothing in the system logs pointing to hardware issues) while they posted not long ago that their own Homey broke down :man_shrugging:t3:

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32

Yeah, pretty funny since mine was app. 6 years old…

Ohh, well…

I’m and IT Engineer, stuff sometimes break down, while others work perfectly.
It’s weird your’s goes bad every 2 weeks while others work for weeks, months, years. And i’m not saying you do something funny with it…

it’s just seems pretty random, and sure, you’ll probably say thats the bad thing about Homey. I’d say it’s just bad about any electric appliance you can think of.

Let’s leave it at that…

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33

To begin, I’d like to clarify that I have no affiliation or partnership of any kind. I’m simply sharing my personal experience as a long-time smart home enthusiast.

It’s no secret that many smart home products on the market fall short of expectations. Sometimes, our approach to integration or setup may also contribute to the challenges we face.

From my experience, Homey Pro truly lives up to its “plug-and-play” reputation. Think of it as purchasing a car, once you own it, maintaining it becomes your responsibility. You wouldn’t blame BMW if aftermarket parts you installed didn’t fit correctly.

Over the years, I’ve searched tirelessly for the perfect all-in-one solution to unify my smart devices. I’ve experimented with Home Assistant, Hoobs, and HomeKit, Homey Pro, just name it. I investing thousands of dollars and many sleepless nights in the process.

If there’s one piece of advice I can offer, it’s this: choose two or three reputable smart device ecosystems such as Lutron, Aqara, or Eve. Those are few example. Integrate them with Homey Pro, and keep your setup simple. You’ll achieve a stable, reliable system without wasting unnecessary resources or energy chasing perfection.emphasized text

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34

As a marketeer, i cannot disagree more.

80% of discontent buyers will not tell the vendor, but they do tell at least 10 of their trusted people.

Only 20% file complaints - and obviously Atom has little interest to learn from them.

Really successful companies listen to their customers and build on the constraints and problems users signal. Be that hardware, usability, manuals, whatever.

In fact the users that have the most skills and knowhow - are the ones least to inform valuable feedback, because they can solve problems themselves.

the 80% however will never buy again and will prevent lots of others to buy.

but hey, when they think their marketing is on-par , who am i to correct them….

35

Wow. I too have about every smart home platform at my home. I’ve basically tried them all. And, they all have their pain points and flaws. But, for simple things, both Homey and Home Assistant work just fine. The complexity for me has always been management of the vast number of devices over some protocol. For instance, why can’t a robust Zigbee network do a good job of polling and keeping Zigbee devices connected? I concur with another person who said “keep it simple and to a few trusted brands”. I get the most reliability from my Lutron and Philips devices that, of course, have their own hubs and integrate extremely well with HA and Homey. I’m not a big fan of Aqara (despite having lots of their devices). But, I don’t think any of them have ever said they were the “end all” for home automation. Find your sweet spot of basic controls and be happy. Remember, if you dig deep into any of the influencers in this space, they all have lots of tools in their home automation tool belt. To be sure, I too have invested thousands of USD in my basic home automation journey and there are things I like about every platform and weaknesses of every platform. But, I always remind myself that this is a DIY space where perfection is very illusive. Cheers!

36

I design and install home automation system. I have installed systems from Loxone, Shelly and in the good old days even X10 stuff. I still have a client using an X10 system that is now 20 years old.

I have tried HA more than once using an Rpi 4. Basic stuff was ok it was controlling my Shelly modules. As many have stated when the main HA program has an update one or more of the plugins stopped working. As a home automation installer for now I would never use HA in a professional setup, as I would be spending most of my time tweaking the system to keep it working.

On the other hand I now use A Homey Pro (with my home setup) works out of the box, a lot easier to set up and no need for a subscription to control stuff outside of the house. True my Shelly modules have this ability via their app. But these days I tend to use just the Homey app on my phone.

If you want a stable automation system and money no object then go for Loxone. It just works and 90% of the time upgrades won’t break anything. And when it does its normally an easy fix or work around. Automation on a budget then its Shelly with Homey Pro, with this set up I can do more complex routines than what is possible with just the Shelly App. Shelly is also developing more and more modules and is partnering with a lot of other companies to provide Shelly compatability so is probably my go to system for installing at the moment, with a Home pro option.

I like to use the car analogy when talking about home automation. Its why we don’t all drive BMW, some people hate them and pick Mercs. Other people can’t afford either so go for something cheaper. And some people will drive a Rolls Royce. They all do the same thing and will take you between points A and B. Some do it faster than others, some do it with more comfort, others will take a long time as they are slower and some will do it faster and in more confort. Same with home automation systems.

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37

Weeks go by without me having to do anything with my HA setup, it just works :man_shrugging:t3:

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38

I love a good rant from time to time, but this thread really has been a waste of 0s and 1s

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39

I do have problem with homey but never have so easy to use en workt with it i do have both homey brige en pro en home assistant all working together en love that without that homey is normaal i love homey i use it everywhere i do have problems with zigbee becouse i have more end device then routers bit that is my problem i do have like +200 device that why but yeah love homey so much if you have problems or so en you want that i help you en advice then i love to solve things that is why haha en maybe my system make it beter idea

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40

I am using Homey 2023 pro for about one year. Before I was using 5 RPi connected as Master Slave with Domoticz.

Comparing to Domoticz, Homey is a lot easier to manage and start with.

I am also using HA installed on my VERO V on Docker and it is working great.

I was using Fibaro HC2 for a month - it was awful and hard to integrate with anything more than Fibaro.

I love my Homey (it looks awesome - for me it is the best looking system on market). Hardware and Software

I have more than 200 devices. Most of them are Fibaro but also a lot of Govee, Eufy, Netatmo, Ikea, Yale, Mersoss, Sonoff, Quoin, Switchbot, Twinkly, Tuya, Smarthings, Roborock, Chromecst and more.

There is no other system I knowa about it is that family friendly and connects so many devices.

HA can do this also and a lot more. Maybe it is not that complicated I was thinking at the beginning but it is harder than in Homey. But I must admit that in HA there is more possibilities. You can do anything You want.

For me the ideal solution is Homey as a main system and HA to devices that Homey doesn’t support.

I need to agree with @robertklep that in HA everything is working very stable and very fast.

On Homey I need to check what is going on every couple of days.

The biggest issue I have with some Homey integrations is they sometimes stopping working and you need to restart them but Homey doesn’t give You any information about this situation

When You restart your router or your power is out (I have Homey connected to UPS so every other devices are off for a while) some integrations are stopping to work and You need to restart them. This is annoying and most problematic thing in Homey for me.

But to be honest I am really enjoying this system

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