After the bankruptcy of some other Dutch companies in the ‘smart’-business it is good to see that Athom’s future is a different path.
Well, well, well, someone from Homey has actually responded on this forum @Emile. There’s a first.
Personally, I think this is bad news in the long-term; we probably have three years before LG starts to exert its corporate muscle. I had the same experience with Ring; I was one of the early backers of DoorBot (its original name) and they promised us all sorts of lifetime benefits. Well, that soon disappeared once they sold to Amazon and I won’t touch one of their products again.
Whatever we’re told by the owners (and I’m not bitter, I’m pleased for them but sad for us users) this is not good news for a product whose purpose was to be manufacturer- and technology-neutral.
- LG is buying the IP behind the system and they will have no long-term interest in continuing to innovate with products from other manufacturers.
- Manufacturers of other products will be more likely to end agreements with Athom/LG because they will no longer see Athom as independent. Over time, we will see many of the mainstay apps not being updated, unless Athom/LG decides to update them but, let’s face it, Athom hasn’t been great at this.
- I can’t see a big corporate tolerating ‘amateurs’ developing apps on their system for other manufacturers’ products. That’s not how large corporates operate.
- Will developers get paid? I doubt it very much; from LGs point of view why would they. As I’ve said previously, LG will not invest money to support other manufacturers’ products (unless they intend to acquire them too).
Are there any advantages? Maybe some better customer service in a couple of years (about a year before LG begins to stop the innovation). Other than that, I really don’t see it being of any advantage to us guineapigs.
I think we have to face facts that this is the beginning of the end for for this independent offering. There are a lot of talented people on here (sadly not me); perhaps we should do our own start-up and complete the project Athom has abandoned?
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I am glad the developers got their money. They deserve it. But, this is the long slow end. Anything more than a 49% stake means it is all over. Think ring, nest, smart things, and on and on. Keep in mind it will be a slow death. Probably 3-5 years before it is over but it is coming. Well I guess long live HA and Hubitat as they are the last ones standing.
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Holy shit I’m so disappointed…
They sold their soul… and I just installed everything with Homey last month….
What a bad news, I’m so disappointed.
The beginning of the end…
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Cashing out. Sell outs. Customers and their data sold. Lg cares nothing for privacy. They will farm your data and sell it to everyone. Like they do on all their products. Soon our homeys will be flogging commercials on our products.
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I use HA Core with Matter.
Ah yes, that’s a bit of an issue: TLS/SSL is enabled by default. Luckily it’s easy to turn it off.
I don’t see why this is necessary, all the HA nodes are available in the Node-RED addon:
But indeed, offtopic.
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Man oh man this is so messed up, I have a dozen friends who invested in the hub, time, automations etc 
Apparently HA is the only way to go. Probably most of the people will make the switch.
It’s always about the money 
Also I don’t know if anyone saw the real statement but the rest of the 20% will be sold off in the next 3 years
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Standard practice. Whatever assertions the previous owners make (and I believe they are genuine) they no longer have control and, in three years, will have no interest.
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Very nice accomplishment for the owners. They did a fantastic job and cannot blame them for this move.
For Homey as a product and for the users I think it is very bad news.
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I hope not but I’m afraid that we will see the same thing that happened to Smartthings after Samsung bought it.
Now is " Ten years of Homey — Ask Me Anything" standing completely in an other light.
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I think we should not draw any conclusions yet, we don’t know on what they agreed on in detail.
Athom knows what happened to smartthings, and I cannot image that they would let that happen to Homey. The benefit of a large company backing them is of course that they have access to alot of new resources, cheaper purchasing of components etc.
On the other hand a 80% stake in the company is alot and I agree that I need to see in practice where this is going. And I will be waiting to replace my Homey Pro 2019 for now…
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This is very bad news indeed.
I can’t think of one example where a takeover like this has resulted in a better product.
Nest/Google, Ring/Amazon, Smartthings/Samsung - all ruined products.
Definitely switching off auto-updates until I know what is in each one and hope that all the infrastructure I’ve invested in is still supported for the foreseeable.
Own nothing LG and building out the Homey ecosystem into their products sounds like a recipe for disaster, hope the two OS’s are kept separate or we’re about to see a lot of issues.
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Well looks like I’m off to buy Hubitat. Keep my data private and they’re not likely to sell out…I’ll be putting my Homey Pro on ebay…
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So they want our data. Not good, not good at all. The whole point of local services was to avoid data being sent to outside of LAN. Not happy
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Hmm, Dashboards when? Or do we need to purchase a LG tv for this feature? 
Nah, back ontopic. I agree with most messages here. We have to see how long Athom can keep going the way they go. But LG is interested in the OS and not in the hardware or community… Hope Athom can keep going the way they wanted to go before the take over. Perhaps 2 OS versions will be made, which do the same thing but from LG with other policy/useagreement than running on the Athom hardware…
Athom has explicitly said that there will be no data collecting. However, they aren’t in control anymore 
I also use Habitat and its great. The latest version has a much improved Dashboards app and they have added a Flow/Red-Node like ability with their new Visual Rules app.
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Raise your hands who will continue using Homey or switch to HA ! 
