I don’t think I agree with this. In the end, Home automation is just programming. All programming is, is arranging a bunch of if, then and else statements together in a very specific way in order to get a desired outcome. Whether you put them together using a fancy and intuitive interface, or just by writing it manually isn’t the hard part. It’s HOW you arrange them together that is the hard part. Even professionally, some programmers like a nice IDE, others prefer a simpler text editor, but it’s not this preference that defines a good or a bad programmer.
Yes, Homey has a very nice and intuitive interface. I really like the way advanced flows work. But I wouldn’t say that this interface enabled me to do automate things that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to automate. If you’re not able to think like a programmer, or like programming in general, no interface will allow you to build your smart home. Below are some examples of advanced flows that require some advanced programming capabilities to comprehend.
What makes Homey or HA better, but also multitudes more complex and thus difficult than all the other platforms like Google Alexa or Homekit is the amount of devices it supports. The bigger companies like Google and Apple decided to go all in on this new standard Matter and Thread, but the reality is that 90% of current smart devices do not support this standard. And also in the future, I wouldn’t even advice to use matter or thread for certain devices when zigbee, z-wave or even 833mhz are way easier, cheaper and/or more energy efficient options. This is what puts the home automation community off. You can be a very big company with lot’s of resources and employees, but in the the end the strength of the community is larger. There are just not a lot of people building apps to support devices on Homekit or Google and Alexa. Homey’s and HA’s communities are way larger.
So don’t be fooled by the sleek looks of Homey and its interface. It is very much a prosumer product and it’s definitely NOT easy!
