I am currently a Home Assistant user but am considering switching to Homey. The main reason I’m using Home Assistant is to control a Zigbee switch that isn’t supported by Apple Home. I’m not doing any advanced automations; for regular control, I only use Apple Home and Siri.
So far, I have connected all my smart home products to Home Assistant and used the HomeKit bridge to expose all devices to Apple Home. It works perfectly, and I haven’t had any connection issues. Previously, I always had issues with Philips Hue when connected directly to Apple Home, but with Home Assistant, it works 100% of the time.
Now, I’m wondering how things would work with Homey. My plan is to connect all my devices (Philips Hue, Aqara, Eve Home, Zigbee switches) to Homey and expose them from there to Apple Home. How reliable and fast is Homey’s HomeKit integration?
If your Home Assistant setup works 100%, I don’t see why you would want to move to Homey.
I’m the developer of the HomeKitty app, and I literally get hundreds of crash reports due to issues that are related to Homey’s being unstable. These issues have existed for so long that I assume they can’t be fixed.
You can get lucky and have no issues whatsoever, or you can be unlucky and never get it working reliably.
Thank you for getting back to me so quickly and honestly. I noticed that you are the developer of the HomeKitty app. It’s really impressive work, and I’ve heard great things about it. There are a few reasons why I’m considering switching to Homey. Firstly, it seems that Homey supports Siri shortcuts, allowing me to create simple automations on Apple Home that can trigger more advanced automations in Homey. I also really like the “Moods” app in Homey, which is much more user-friendly than anything in Home Assistant. However, the main reason I’m considering the switch is that I want to change my switches to Button+, which has great integration with Homey that Home Assistant doesn’t have.
I’ve seen that Homey has Home Assistant integrations. How well does that work? In theory, I could keep everything in Home Assistant and just use Homey for advanced Siri shortcuts and Button+ configurations. How well does Homey retrieve Home Assistant devices?
I’m not sure what you mean. Home Assistant has more elaborate Shortcut support than Homey has, and overall its iOS support is much better (like passing sensor data so you can access battery % or charging state from within HA, and you can trigger Shortcuts on your iDevice from Home Assistant).
I assume that you mean “great integration”, because there is “just regular” integration for HA.
I have no experience with it, but I’m fairly sure it works reasonably well, at least the community HA app (not the “official” one).
