Hi all.
WOW! What a responses we’ve received on this news, including lots of media coverage and of course all of your thoughts here in this conversation! We expected some of it, but still it’s overwhelming when it all happens.
Of course, Emile has already commented before in this topic. We continue to see a lot of activity though, and that’s perfectly understandable. As engaged user, I’d also want to know what happens to my beloved smart home system. So first of all: Thank you for all your engagement! 
We see a lot of things being written and said in various places, so I wanted to chime in and clarify where we can.
- First of all: don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
We’ve seen quite some comments based on an Australian news article from a less-than-reputable website with made-up information. We informed with LG about it and it seems there’s some even-shadier business behind the scenes, including a business model based on rectifications. I will not dive into this any deeper. I just wanted to emphasize that, unfortunately, not everything written on the internet is true. - For our official statements, please refer to our Press Release and the one from LG’s Press Office.
- We perfectly understand that all of this is new, and therefore might be a bit scary. Let me emphasize that there are currently no plans whatsoever to discontinue any Homey hardware or Homey software. LG is explicitly interested in Homey because of our great platform, software and community, and lets us do what we need in order to keep these in place, and, even better, improve these. That’s why we are investing even more in Homey now than we were before, including new hires to our Netherlands-based team and additional sales channels. With LG’s backing and scale, this could make Homey much bigger as well – and as a platform battling some of the world’s biggest companies, that’s a huge plus.
- Our entire team stays in place. Even though that’s no 100% guarantee for the future – after all, we can’t freeze the current team forever – it does mean that Homey is continued with the same people and the same mindset as it was before.
- We understand that there’s some unclarity about data and privacy. Robebare and Jonathan commented on that pretty well already in the posts above me: Homey, both our hardware and our software, remain governed by our Privacy Policy, which is pretty strict in that regard. This means personal data is still processed with the highest care and very conservatively, and in the case of Homey Pro on-device. Next to personal data, we also have (aggregated) usage data indeed, which is not personal, nor can it ever be traced back to an individual. This would be information like the number of installs a Homey app has, or what the most-used features in the Homey app are. This information is already super interesting, of course, without touching on anyone’s privacy.
Again, this is all pretty new. We understand it might introduce new uncertainties, which invoke theories again. On the other hand, we’ve also heard uncertainties before about us being a small company and therefore possibly not financially sound (even though we were). Being backed by LG solves these theories again.
Long story short: please understand that us becoming part of LG has been done with the best intentions for our users, developers and community in mind. I hope us saying this explicitly puts your minds to ease a bit. Saying isn’t all though, so we plan to show this to you as well! We continue to execute our roadmap, including continued sale of Homey devices, new (software) features and even an extended hardware line-up in the future, so stay tuned…
For now, thanks for reading a way-too-long post, and enjoy your day. Again, I’m glad to see everyone’s so enormously engaged!
Stefan
