I know there are some other threads similar to this, but I am hoping to ask a few specific questions relevant to my case and with answers based on latest software and hardware updates.
The Homey dream was sold to me in one of their sponsored blog posts that appeared at the top of my Google search results. My immediate reaction was that I must get me one of these, but in researching ever since various questions have been bugging me:
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How is the extra cost justified vs hubs like smart things or hubitat?
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There is a relatively small amount of reviews/commentary out there about this product, I note the Twitter feed has under 1,000 followers. Is this a growing company that will be improving the product or is it slowly shrinking away?
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Similar to #2 above, I live in the UK but it seems to have hardly registered as a product to the UK market, is it fully supported and compatible in the UK
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Some topics on this forum discuss quite negative reviews of the quality of the product, is this fair? Will this improve? Are there more reliable alternatives?
All thoughts and ideas welcome. As I said at the start, the dream has been sold to me and i love the concept, product design etc, but does reality match my expectations?
Generally, homey is good device, to me quite uniqe on the market. I do sometimes feel like its in kickstarter phase still but its improving and soon it will have backup and I’m still hoping for per device authorization so my kid cannot acidentially open a garage or change the heating i.e… Because of this some parts of the home I still keep separate and out of homey.
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Theres a good review here of the homey vs hubitat
https://youtu.be/c4kEYy-mFM4 - I definitely wouldnt go
smart things, it’s a mess now.
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Home automation is still early adopter phase outside
of Smart things, Fibaro and Wink (last 2 are dying)
you wont get much reviews. All I can say is the
community forum is crazy active and helpful. That’s all you need.
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I live in Asia… and it works perfectly so you are fine
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Truth is none of the products are even near perfect.
I think they complain even more in smartthings forum.
I started from scratch with Homey so bought only devices that were recommended by community here and so things worked ok. People who shift from other hubs tend to be more critical or just buy stuff without asking.
eg my motion sensors aquara Motion sensors are amazing.
I blanketed my house with them. Same for my neocool door sensies
both are cheap and super responsive.
Ask the forum and you wont go wrong
Dont get me wrong Homey is far from perfect. 2.0 fixed
quite a bit for me like native Google assistant support (
response time is cut by half for me), the app is a lot nicer.
But I still get random weird errors where Google will say
cant reach homey and yet do the action.
The app seems to be unstable and slow to load for me when put of same wifi as homey etc
Music casting I understand is pretty much dead etc.
The IR feature in Homey is pretty much non existent and
weak, I hear they even took out the IR learning feature in
2.0 but never really worked well most people just buy a
cheap broadlink rm to cover that.
But Homey works for me. My wife relies on it. Its
interface is powerful yet easy to use.
Overall I doubt there is anything as powerful yet user friendly for a beginner.
Honestly I fully expect that in 5 maybe even 3 years I will have
to switch hubs. That’s the price you pay for adopting iot,
nothing is mature yet. But at least Homey is mostly local
so I understand even if Homey goes down you still
can work most things unlike smartthings that is reliant
a lot on their servers
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I wouldn’t say it‘s user friendly/easy device, since there‘s still no real dashboard available and it‘s not that easy to create flows for beginners.
You already need flows if you want to control your lights with a dimmer. It‘s just for advanced users and it‘s far away from plug and play imo.
And unfortunately there‘s still no official offline backup solution available yet. Only over the paid cloud, which can lead to problems if your internet connection is bad or goes down.
