As we know the current apps for Homey are spotty at best and more and more device-apps are not being supported anymore they simply do not work and are outdated because of a developer that quits their Homey or loses interest.
thats why i’m trying to import al my devices trough alternative sources like Home Assistant or MQTT but as of today there isn’t much information how to do that.
What i’ve tried:
Official Homey Home Assistant App: Works, Nags about being available on homey but fine, does not work with blinds / covers / curtains and some devices only show their sensor. Also the app crashes allot while importing devices (because its a long list)
Community Home Assistant App: Works, edit “app.json” and change the app name so you can run it together with the official one. lacks update’s the “compound” feature is broken and adding (Hue) lights doesn’t detect the dim / brightness feature only on / off
MQTT app: doesn’t really work? i dont know how to import devices says something abount “statestream” but appart from a ITHO Fan i never got it working with home assistant itself.
Does anyone have good idea’s ? or maybe someone wants to help with updating the community app? i’ve tought about paying a developer to update the community app but i don’t know what the standpoint is on that with the community.
I’d like to support this question, struggling with the same. Due to the many problems in Homey related to the z-wave devices responding slow or not at all and a very unstable mesh network I now have migrated half of the z-wave devices to HA (that already had other integrations) and what a relief that was. I don’t want to have double integrations (e.g. the airconditioner or kitchen appliances) so the compound solution of the HA community app sounded great. It isn’t broken, but only supports limited device capabilities and has other flaws as well. The community app has not been maintained or upgraded for 4 years. Now I’m considering to try the MQTT integration/app as an alternative, but I’m not sure whether this will bring an improvement. I would like to know if other users successfully integrated MQTT into Homey to control devices that are configured in HA.
Considering the remark to upgrade the HA Community App is also an option. Should at least be upgraded to SDKv3 and the compound feature further extended.
Your post was a while ago, but can you expand a little more on the responsiveness of the z-wave devices. I have mostly (30+) Fibaro switches and they seem to work nicely, be it with a little delay that did not bother me. However, I noticed that after a Homey reboot, some devices do not respond until I manually flip the physical switch a few times. It would be interesting to hear what kid of problem you had.
I have just added HA (the official app) to my Homey install and it improved nicely on the responsiveness of the Philips Hue motion sensors. I was hoping to avoid HA other than that.
I migrated all my Z-wave devices (51) to HA. I noticed that the variety of devices all required their own app and that was slowing down Homey and even resulted in errors in the app due to memory limitations. Even now having all supporting apps for the devices uninstalled I only have 4% memory available, but it is working. I’m now preparing Homey for an RMA just to be sure that the device is not defective.
The problems with Homey z-wave resulted in non responsive devices, unreachable devices, unknown devices, routings that uses non-existing nodes, etc.
However, this doesn’t mean that switching to HA resolved all issues, new issues occurred there as well. But these can be managed, HA provides far more supporting tools than Homey and puts you as user more in control than Homey does. True, if the Homey z-wave feature is working properly than Homey is far more user friendly. That is why I now use the HA Community app in Homey (and not the official app), for example to use the advanced flows. Ronny Winkler is very helpful in resolving matters or find a solution for other issues. I believe HA and Homey complement each other and in my case I already needed HA for other reasons (P1 smart meter, ADSB receiver). Let me know If you have additional questions. I’m not saying that I have an answer to all issues, but we always can exchange experiences.
That reminds me, I still have to buy Ronny a coffee…
