Honestly, is Homey good now?

Questions & Help
1

Hi everyone,

I have not used Homey for a while, in fact I sold my Homey over two years ago as I was very disappointed by the experience back then. I unfortunately had to return to Home Assistant, which I hate with a passion, as I found it to be the only solution to my needs. There has been an unfortunate development with Synology DSM, that I run my Home Assistant on via docker, where USB support is dropped. Therefore I now have to use workarounds to use my Z-Wave stick from Aoetec and my deCONZ stick for ZigBee which I am definitely not a fan of.

I would therefore like to know if it would be sensible to give Homey another try now, or whether I should expect the same kind of issues?

The problems that I remember on my Homey journey were many, but some of them:

  1. Extreme short range of the antennas, meaning you essentially had to make antenna mods to make it useful
  2. ZigBee integration was garbage, and there was talks of a “ZigBee rewrite” that, in my time with Homey, never became a reality
  3. Apps were crashing a lot, and had to use flows to reset all the integration apps regularly
  4. Making simple dimming functions with switches was downright impossible. By that I mean mimicking the functionality of say a Hue dimmer switch, where you can hold a button to dim down/up.
  5. Hue integration was in general very problematic, possibly due to the missing ZigBee rewrite. I remember it barely functioning and lacking support for so many products, if not using a Hue bridge. If using a Hue bridge, there were problems with functionality dropping out etc. It is pretty much essential that I can use the Homey as bridge and ditch the Hue bridge, so that all the battery powered ZigBee devices can join the mesh.
  6. There was a lack in functionality for turning on say a Hue bulb with a certain “scene”. Say I would have a motion sensor detect movement, and depending on time of the day, turn on the light at various brightness/color tones. This did not work properly, as the light would always turn on at the “last” setting and then change after, which wasn’t at all what I was looking for.
  7. Lots of integrations had very poor implementations. I remember for example that LIFX could not integrate locally, and it would take more than 10 seconds to react as it had to go over a cloud, if it did react at all.
  8. Another thing with ZigBee was that devices couldn’t interact directly. This means that all commands had to go through the Homey bridge, which often proved problematic. With deCONZ for example, switches can be control lights directly, which makes for much better reliability.

Anyone that would like to share their experiences?

2

  1. I had issues with honeys range when I first started, however after building a real mesh all such issues stopped completely. Neither protocols are meant for 1 → 1 communications

  2. Zigbee rewrite has occurred, I never really had issues with the aquara devices and my hue devices are connected to the bridge so perhaps someone else can answer this better.

  3. Apps still crash, every now and again, I feel
    Like that it is generally the community ones rather then offical ones? Again depends on which specifi app you are taking about. And what “often”

3

But doesn’t work for IKEA as multiple remotes don’t get a unique zone id.

4

Is this actually how it works or is this only to ensure that all devices are using the same Extended Pan ID so they can be linked directly ? (Homey bridge meant Homey in this usage)