I understand your point, @Patrik_Wall. When we say “Everything local,” we’re referring to Homey Pro itself running all of its processes locally. However, this doesn’t always apply to third-party products integrated with the platform.
A good analogy is Apple’s privacy claim. They assure that their devices prioritize user data protection. However, if a user installs a malicious app from the App Store that misuses data, it doesn’t invalidate Apple’s commitment to privacy. Apple can certainly take steps to prevent such incidents, but it’s unrealistic to expect absolute control over everything that happens on their platform.
At Homey, we always advocate for local implementations with brands, as it’s something our community values. However, not all brands prioritize full local control as their ultimate goal.
I think this is a fair explanation and good analogy.
If I can make a suggestion, it would be good for both Homey and customers to explain this in a knowledge base article along with the solution you mentioned earlier to regain access to Homey when internet is down.
When customers have such issue, they don’t want / have no time to browse the forum.
I came across another topic in french here in the community where after a power outage, he lost internet for few days. Homey had an incorrect time / date because of the power outage and therefore some of his automation were running at an incorrect time. Automation like opening or closing shutter in the middle of the night
I agree it should be documented, but that’s just a band aid;
This is a major bug… not a case of lacking documentation imho.
Homey should notice by itself the wifi access is restricted to LAN, and the phone’s 5G mobile data is used to connect to internet.
The app should of course not try to connect via internet first, but via LAN.
This is actually handled by the phone, not Homey. When the phone detects that Wi-Fi isn’t functioning, it automatically switches to cellular data. Homey doesn’t have the capability to tell the phone to prioritize searching for it on the local network rather than using the internet.
The same issue occurs when setting up new devices that rely on a Wi-Fi network for configuration. Often, the phone disregards the network because it doesn’t detect an active internet connection, requiring you to disable cellular data during the setup process.
Wouldn’t “Local processing” be a more fitting sentence to use rather than “Everything local” if what you mean is that processing is handled locally but nothing else?
Which in itself is kind of redundant since we actually buy a computer from you, of course it is gonna process thing locally, why else would there be a powerful CPU and lots of memory if it was gonna do the processing on a server?
In this case, you can not even control the Homey itself locally (since my.homey.app apparently is running off a server), so I really don’t think it’s a correct statement.
Prioritize doesn’t mean the same thing as claiming user data is always 100% protected, so I don’t feel like the equivalent wordings are used here (I mean, everything is, well, everything).
If Apple instead would have said that “All you privacy data is 100% protected at all times” (more equivalent to your “Everything” statement), then I would assume that the device was completely sandboxed and no privacy data could slip out, even when installing malicious apps (which then probably wouldn’t exist in the first place since their claim would suggest no such apps could even exist)
Anyway, now that I understand what you mean and how this actually works (I really think you should reword that statement since it’s not true and there is no need to lie, Homey has good things going for it without lying), I have some follow up questions:
Is there any update planned for the Homey so that you could actually connect to it through its IP-adress and bring up the webinterface to actually create flows/scripts etc? (much like you control routers etc).
Wouldn’t it be theoretically possible for the apps inside Homey to listen to what the WIFI devices are doing and when a device tries to contact a server to send data, intercept that message and parse the message locally inside the Homey (and send whatever expected data back to the device), this way basically creating a locally controlled device? This would then only require some update for the app to make cloud devices locally controlled as intended.
Sure, brands like Tuya might have arguments against it, but it should be technically possible right?
This is a great discussion that explains a lot of the issue I have been through lately.
I feel I’m pretty much in the same situation as Patrik_Wall.
Before buying (3 weeks ago) I did some research and check that all my existing devices were compatible. Most of them had official apps and the community covered the rest. So all good. I was also in the impression that by being compatible with Homeypro they would run locally and:
would be faster
would run even when internet was down.
Sadly this is not the case for some of them (I have been simulating an internet outage to test my settings for the last few days). I still like the product in particular its large support for devices, protocols and the community. Being able to integrate all of my automation using one system is great. I now understand the limitation and the constraints here but I think Athom could be more upfront on that point given it is one of their key selling point,
There should be a knowledge article describing a bit more what happen when internet is down and in particular what does not work anymore or might not work. This is not documented well enough and I should not have to spend hours testing my devices and trying to figure out if I’m doing something wrong. Why do I have to come to this discussion to find out that Tuya does not want people to run their devices locallly…
In the App store it should be clearly noted which app or functionality in the app requires an internet connection to work. That way I would have known before buying that some of my devices would still need internet to work. This is clearly doable for all official apps.
But for me the real issue, is not being able to access the homeypro locally from a Mac or PC. Having to rely on an android device is better than nothing but it is very limited. If you invest in a Homey pro for your automation then you want to have a big screen to design and troubleshoot your flows. If you can access your router then there is no reason why you can’t access a server hosted in the Homey using a static IP.
That said I’m not sure about sniffing packets from another device in order to replicate the action locally. If the manufacturer does not allow a device to be controlled locally then trying to reverse engineer its comms can not be supported officially. It might be OK for a community project but quite difficult. I’m sadly going to move my Tuya plugs to non-essential duties and replace them with something that can work locally.
First, I want to say that I really like my Homey Pro 2023. Like many others who love Homey, I want our smart home platform of choice to be successful. For me, running everything locally isn’t a requirement, but for those who were misled into thinking all Homey apps can work completely offline due to a lack of documentation, they will realize the limitations, return their products, and leave a bad review which will then affect sales.
There’s nothing worse than a negative review that could have been avoided with more clarity from the beginning. By providing more guidance, Homey can set the correct expectations and avoid these bad reviews or rant on the community.
In the App store it should be clearly noted which app or functionality in the app requires an internet connection to work. That way I would have known before buying that some of my devices would still need internet to work. This is clearly doable for all official apps.
I really like that idea, and it would make things much clearer for anyone purchasing a Homey in the future. In terms of implementation, it should be listed for all apps or nothing, for community apps, you can at least state something like: “Internet requirement: verify with the app developer.”
To recap, it would be great to have a knowledge base article that covers the following:
Homey requires internet and a mobile app with internet access for the initial setup.
After setup, Homey Pro itself runs locally, but certain features require the internet.
After the setup, apps that require the internet to work are documented on the page of each app.
Explain the procedure to regain control over Homey during an internet outage.
How long Homey can work without the internet. There are subtle differences between what will continue to work forever and being able to access the Homey app for management.
Maybe some other items we are missing
If I’m not mistaken, another section of the same article could detail how to use Homey completely offline for the automation of local devices (after the initial setup, which does require the internet) and what the drawbacks of this setup are (no notifications, no access to management, etc.). Provide a simple scenario with a couple of devices to explain the concept and what must be avoided for this to work.
Again, I love my Homey Pro for what it offers today and just want even more happy customers.
Being able to manage your home automation system is an integral part of it and it would, IMO, be disingenuous to suggest that Homey can run completely offline because it will be very easy for people to skip over the “but you can’t manage it” part (or simply not understand what that actually means).
That’s the same as suggesting that Homey can run without drawing any power with the caveat that it won’t run any of your automations (because it’s off).
I also want to clarify, I do enjoy Homey so far and when investigating my options, Homey is by far the best option for me, since it is both powerful enough, support most devices and have an intuitive interface. My other alternative was Home Assistant but i really didnt want to go down that rabbit hole since I am a developer and dont want to spend my free time working as well just to be able to control my home.
The issues I now have however, could partly have been avoided with more clear documentation for sure, I would then not have purchased a whole bunch of wifi devices to begin with, most devices out there are unfortunately wifi based but at least I would have known the limitations and could have made a greater effort in finding alternative devices.
Not being able to control the Homey itself offline is really unfortunate, but as soon as every flow is setup as intended and working all on their own, its not really a huge problem, the amount of times that internet goes down per year is really not that many.
I think Athom relies on the lack of clarity so that their marketing material can keep on suggesting that Homey Pro is a fully-offline device. It would be strange to then write an article that would state the opposite, or that “fully-offline” comes with unreasonable caveats like being unable to manage or configure Homey.
I really don’t understand why people think running HA is so difficult. I literally never have to do anything to keep it running, and it never fails. Plus it can be fully controlled when my internet connection is down
That’s exactly the point of this request. Create clarity to avoid ambiguity and help customers navigate on what is possible and what is not possible, help them purchase the right devices or change devices for those who want it to work with Homey. I personally think this is not done on purpose by Athom because as stated above by @Doekse, from their perspective, Homey by itself can work locally and offline but under specific conditions. OK they are not clearly documented but I think depending how you look at it, it’s not entirely false or not entirely true either. It just deserves clarifications to set the right expectations and help customers instead of returning the products in some case.
And that’s why U’m replacing all my Tuya smart plugs with “Shelly Plus Plug S” plugs because they work local through wifi & Bluetooth. In a month its Black Friday, so keep an eye on Shelly devices.
The Shelly Blu motion sensors are awesome too from my (short=3 weeks) experience.
Patrik, I solved it this way. My ISP supplied modem can only handle 30 clients. So I put a Asus modem behind it. Output ISP modem to the WAN port of the Asus. On that Asus I have all my IOT running. But the Asus can handle 2 WAN ports. I adjust the other Wan port as a USB port. On that port I connected a very old Mobile, Nexus 5, I configured that mobile in USB tethering mode. Bought a Sim - Data only card from “Always Connected”.
I configured the Asus Wan port in Failover and Failback. If my ISP provider fall down, the system switches automatically to the USB Wan port and back if the ISP is in the air again.
I also “patched” this “not everything local” bug by buying a 4G box with a data sim card and a zwave plug connected to my wifi mesh router.
When Homey detects that the internet is down it switches the 4Gbox on…
A bit offtopic, but I find that a bit hard to believe, because thats really limited. What brand & model modem do you use?
The KPN Experia v10a for example, can reserve max. 30 IP addresses, which is a different thing.
It should be able to connect 253 clients on one subnet just fine.
I’ve around a 100 connected clients atm, and I use an additional DHCP server.
I refuse to believe someone posting to this forum (or even having bought a Homey) would not know there are devices which are cloud dependent.
Expecting a browser app is unrealistic as well. That is a massive undertaking.
Expecting Homey to intercept cloud calls and act on them when one’s Internet Servic is down is beyond unreasonable.
It’s the same story with Homey as it is with a lot of startups. Everyone is all in and happy it has whatever the functionality they bought it for. Most stay happy while a few others start complaining it does not have a certain feature they want or they realize they do not understand how a feature works. These complainers do more damage than good as the forums get bogged down with issues that will never be addressed.
My ISP is Ziggo, a cable company and the modem is from Arris of Compal.
The spec;s say 34 clients, but with 30 clients the modem is not reliable anymore .
I have 46 IOT clients running including a Ring Alarmsystem.
