Should I leave Homey behind?

Off-Topic
1

I first came to Homey many years ago with the 2019 model. At the time, I eventually left because the platform simply wasn’t reliable enough for my needs.

I came back in 2026 with a Homey Pro 2026 and was genuinely enthusiastic about how much the platform had evolved.

At the same time, I still missed several functions and possibilities, so instead of just complaining about them, I started developing my own apps.

I ended up writing five Homey apps.

My latest one, Widget Forge, became quite successful for dashboards, and my Fronius app is also used by many people with that specific PV system. The other apps are smaller, but still have a good number of installations.

Unfortunately, I then ran into serious Matter and Thread problems that lasted for months.

Homey support wasn’t particularly helpful in solving them, and only a few forum members really invested time in helping me. I may forget someone, so please don’t take this as me not appreciating anyone else’s help, but the names I particularly remember are @ulrikb, @Rammstein and @robertklep.

Eventually I installed Home Assistant in parallel, mainly because I needed better diagnostic and analytical tools.

That helped a lot.

But while digging deeper into Home Assistant, I discovered something I had not really expected: many of the functions I had missed in Homey could simply be built directly in HA without writing an app at all.

And once I understood Helpers, Templates, Scripts, Traces and the automation logic, I started building automations that were much more complex and useful than anything I had previously built in Homey.

Over time, I moved my productive smart home almost completely to Home Assistant.

But I am still here.

I still think Homey is a very cool platform for a different type of user — someone looking for a good compromise between simplicity, a friendly interface and reasonably powerful automation.

I still want to support the users of my apps.

I still want to help other Homey users when I can.

I even still use my Homey as an additional Thread Border Router.

The difference is that I am not a fanboy.

I can see advantages in Homey, Home Assistant and other systems.

Some of my posts are simply intended to help Homey users — Wi-Fi and Thread channel information, technical experiences, troubleshooting and things I learned the hard way.

Other posts are critical.

Sometimes I point out things that I think Homey does badly. Sometimes I show something another platform does better and suggest that Homey could learn from it.

At the same time, I have also repeatedly said that there are things Homey does very well and that I would like to see Home Assistant learn from.

For me, that is normal.

No platform is perfect.

Homey gave me both very good and very bad experiences. Home Assistant does some things much better for my particular needs, but that doesn’t suddenly make Homey a bad product.

What bothers me increasingly is that I now regularly encounter comments along the lines of:

“Piss off.”
“Then leave the platform.”
“This is a Homey support forum, so stop talking negatively about Homey.”

And that leaves me with a genuine question.

Should I simply leave Homey behind?

Should I stop maintaining and updating my five apps?

Should I stop supporting their users?

Should I stop sharing technical information and experiences here?

Simply because I also have critical opinions about the platform?

Personally, I don’t think supporting a platform should require pretending that it has no weaknesses.

But I am genuinely interested in what the wider community thinks.

2

I don’t think anyone can answer that quiestion but you.. .

But personaly, I think if you created app ppl rely on, you should maintain them, or transfer them to someone who will continue the work. There is noting I hate more than a job half done, and App abandoned and the user left with a hell of a job the replace it, if that’s even possible, or beeing left with the bugs and errors…

I sometimes love Homey, and sometimes hat it. But over all I find a way to work with it. In the end, it does things that makes things easyer, it doesn’t make things work…

3

That was — and still is — my intention.

But silently maintaining apps in the background while no longer participating in the community with my own experiences, questions and ideas is not something I would find very motivating.

The repeated hostile comments are frustrating. At some point they make creative contributors wonder whether they are simply wasting time that could be spent more productively elsewhere.

I am not asking to be thanked, praised or treated differently because I wrote some apps.

I would simply like to be seen as part of the community and to be allowed to have critical opinions as well.

Supporting a platform should not require agreeing with everything it does or pretending that every decision is perfect.

I can maintain my apps, help users and still say when I think Homey could do something better.

What becomes exhausting is when criticism is answered with insults, hostility or “then leave”.

That is the kind of atmosphere that eventually makes contributors lose the motivation to contribute at all.

4

If I had to name one biggest issue I had with the Homey platform, it would be community apps that no longer get any support. On multiple occasions I have found a community app that would be exceedingly useful to me, if only I could get it to work… but either the app developer has opted out of support, or has just abandoned the app and doesn’t respond. It’s incredibly frustrating at times.

I do have Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 5… but purely for Music Assistant, and connecting to the odd device Homey doesn’t support. When it comes to automation, the Advanced Flows are hard to beat (even if the web editor is frustratingly slow at times). Home Assistant automating just seems like so much hard work to get even the simplest thing done or working. And as much as I love Music Assistant, it does irk me that the Audio Analysis keeps getting 1/4 to a 1/2 of the way through analysing the loudness of my 16k song local library and then just keeps starting from scratch… I’ll be pushing up daisies before it finishes :rofl:

5

Understood, btw I never call myself a á fanboy’ I just like products als long is it wordk for me, ‘fanboys’ imho are wearing blindfolds..

Haveing said that, I do like Homey, with all it’s goods and bads. And if I hate something, I say it.

And as for the hostile comments, you’re about my age :grin: You should know: jerks are averywhere, there’s no running away from them, just ignore them.

Just make your comments, the best contributions are from the one’s not ignoring the shortcomings..

6

You can always Mute the accounts of the worst offenders so you don’t have to read their negativity and hate-spewing…

7

I know, but I get more satisfaction from actively ignoring them :laughing:

Only if someone is on a personal vendetta I mute someone, wich is rarely* (I must be doing something well :innocent: )

*Maybe 3 or 4 times in my life…

8

So far I have only muted one person.

And I do totally agree, people should be able to have differing opinions… being offended by something does not constitute harm, and is not illegal… you just shrug it off and continue. The “I’m offended” and cancel culture crowd growing in society these days should all just get in the bin, it’s quite infuriatingly dumb and stupid in my opinion.

People are allowed to have differing opinions… and things and platforms are never going to be perfect, they are by nature of being created by flawed people inherently flawed… just work with what you’ve got ha ha

9

That’s something only you can answer. If you don’t use Homey anymore and no longer want to (or don’t have the time to) support your apps, you can always transfer them to another developer so the users won’t be left in the dark.