Ten years of Homey — Ask Me Anything 💬

[Emile]

Ten years of Homey — Ask Me Anything

Today is our tenth birthday!

To celebrate, we’ll host an AMA (Ask Me Anything) livestream on Monday June 3rd, 19:00 CEST. This is a nice opportunity to ask anything to Athom’s founders: Stefan (Commercial Director) and Emile (Creative Director).

Make sure to set a reminder on YouTube so you won’t miss it!

If you can’t make it, reply your question to this topic, and we’ll try to answer it during the livestream.

Reply to this topic »
Watch live on YouTube

[Emile]

I’ll start: is dashboards coming??!1

[Hielke_de_Jong]

First of all: congratulations.

Questions:

• Is Athom going to improve the integration with Google?
• Is Athom planning to share their roadmap with the community?
• Is Athom planning to share their work-in-progress with support tickets with the community?

[Sharkys]

CONGRATS ! WISH YOU NEXT 10 YEARS AT MINIMUM ;-)

Some questions from my side :

• users are complaining about “everything” local statement, while it’s not fully - can you maybe share some plans here ? They might be expecting even Homey Webapp working without authentication but the tokens are key here
• any chances to have Homey 2023 PRO - 4 / 6 GB RAM at least, with some significant discount for current clients ? RAM is significant limiting factor. Also, have you considered active cooling ?
• community might appreciate some details of Zigbee malfunction, also in the past ZWAVE issues - might be worth to share some experience / lesson learned (depends how much your partnership with Silicon Labs allows)
• any chances to have BLE finally working

[Undertaker]

@Emile

I’ll start: is dashboards coming??!1

[Undertaker]

@Sharkys

any chances to have Homey 2023 PRO - 4 / 6 GB RAM at least, with some significant discount for current clients ? RAM is significant limiting factor. Also, have you considered active cooling ?

I would order immediately!

[staeff]

What are your plans for compatibility with new matter versions? How much of v1.1, v1.2, v1.3 is currently supported and what parts are missing?

Are you going to allow “unofficial” matter hubs to connect to Homey like Homekit does? E.g. a mqtt2matter bridge running on a Raspberry Pi.

[staeff]

Also some kind of way to track feature requests like user voice which actually gets some interaction from Athome would be great. It’s such a shame most feature requests in the community forums just go to waste.

[RonnyW]

Congrats to 10 years!

Some more technical questions I don’t think relevant for the AMA show. But it would be nice to get some feedback

A little more flexibility for developers like:

• define sorting/grouping of device sensors
• allow programatically changes of capability enum lists (modes)
• perhaps add an optional custom view in device details (html like a repair view)

Many apps would benefit.

And I would love to see more direct contact to the Athom dev team via Slack. Perhaps a developer support channel (like the old HP23 channel) to post issues are ask athom devs witout tagging single users

[metalMajor]

I will most likely order a Homey for my new home, however, I would like to know if there is a new version of the hardware just around the corner. In that case, I would wait and order a new 2024 model for example. I ask it also because I would like to have a video doorbell(don’t know yet which one) integrated so I could see a video stream in the homey app. Is the hardware/homey able to do that?
Thanks! Best regards, Tom

[Peter_Kawa]

Congrats guys,

A. Over the years, I wonder more and more why the device detail screen looks like a kid’s phone, and why Athom:

1. Cannot by default sort the capabilities by name or last update ? Is it very difficult to implement?
   Now it’s a random mess

And why users and devs:

2. Cannot choose to sort it by name or last update
3. Cannot mark a few fav capabilities, so they’re always on top
4. Cannot read longer texts; Make dissappearing text appear when hitting the capability: now it’s cut off and nothing can be done to reveal the rest of the text
   Take a look at screenshot A2 “Last data update”.
5. Cannot choose between the kids screen and an overview screen for grown-ups, like the one I see when I want to pick a status indicator (screenshot B)
   It shows you can do it
6. Cannot add and use sections → sort of zones-like at the devices screen, to be able to sort unimportant and important capabilities for example.

Example of a P1 meter device:

A1

A2

B

B. Mobile app v8.x:
Is it possible to animate the scrolling smoothly without all those hickups? And its all soooooo slooooooowww, the v6 app was snappier!!
Ah, I just saw you’re still looking for that developer :

Can we please get a choice to disable all “fancy” screen effects? It looks horrible and amateur like imho, and to me it’s very annoying
Maybe I’m just getting old
Yes I disabled any animation on my phone, but your app found a way to ignore my wishes…

[Jamie]

Congratulations! Huge milestone, and its certainly been a lot of fun being along for the ride, I have some questions -

General

• Why are there so few (device/zone) icons to choose from?

Developer Tools

• Any plans to give developers more analytics such as the ability see how many of each of each driver or device are installed?
• Can developers get a new (templated) app setting page for simple app settings, utilzing a similar approach to the device settings? (overrideable)
• Add the ability to send a diganostic report which is filtered by a single device.
• How about a best practice approach / demo for unit testing homey apps (coverage checks) in order to help improve the quality of community apps?
• Can we get better support for typeScript?

Devices

• Can we get a setting to exclude devices from alexa?
• When an app is updated, can the timeline show the change log item?
• More Icons?

Flows

• Any thoughts around adding a ‘finally’ to flows (as experiment)?
• More presence flows (everyone is asleep, last person HOME went to sleep)
• Can we please get a modern approach to weather flows, ie the app already has access to weather information - why cant we build flows from it?
• A new trigger when any device alarm changes

IR

• Send raw IR from the tools page?
• Select homey bridge to send raw and hex IR codes from tools

Capability

• Can we get a capability for ‘arrow buttons’ (left, right, up, down)?
• Live video capability?

App

• Better searching in the app for flows?
• Icons seem to be low cost high reward, can we get some more?

Zones

• More zone icons?
• Can we get the ability to reorder zones again?
• Currently zones assume that when my front door is open the house is active” and when it’s close not active. Any plans to look at changing how contact sensors are managed in the smart home apps?

Tiles

• Can we get Extra large tiles, with more data?
• What about Tile with table information?
• Tile with insight data?
• More icons for tiles?

Virtual Zones

• Have you considered Virtual Zones - ability to put device into one or more ‘virtual’ zone in addition ?
• Allow devices to be shown and hidden from a virtual zone, using flows?
• Show insights titles on virtual zones?
• Show XL titles on virtual zones?

Hardware

• Homey Ultra Pro Max Extreme?
• Homey bridge / satalite with thread support?

New Map View

• Map view created by LiDAR map generator?

Other

• Homey Pro is good … whats next (circa 2025)?

[Rene1]

Congrats !
Is the number of wireless Aqara sensors which can be connected to Homey pro (older model) limited? I have ~10 Aqara door sensors and temperature sensors, and have difficulty adding the Aqara water leak sensors.

[TedTolboom]

Congrats on the 10 years!

One question / feature that has been requested since the Zigbee rewrite:
When will Zigbee Groups, one of the basic Zigbee functionalities, available on all other Zigbee controllers, be implemented on Homey?

(soon is not an allowed option)

[schmucke]

Happy Birthday! Cheers for the next 20 years

My Questions:

• • Is a App rework planing?
    * - i think it would b great to list by type - so i can make sites with my favs, or only musik (Like the Home Assitant App)
• • is it in the future possible to edit “Advanced flows” with the mobile app?

I try to watch the yt later

[Warmduscher]

Congrats!!

• Is there a plan to implement a permission management for users and also for devices?

• Can we expect more icons, or to add own icons?

EDIT Some addition questions came to my mind which could also be interesting for other “normal” users…

• Would it be possible to develop a zigbee route map for HP23 (like for zwave)?
  This would be very helpful for troubleshooting and to check the efficency of the mesh (like the zwave node overview).

• Are there any plans to make it possible to create local backups (maybe as extension of available backup addon)?

• Any thoughts around implementing a log functionallity?
  I know apps like Simple SysLog and Paperlog, and also the card to write something to the timeline. But logging is for me a basic functionallity which should be work out-of-the-box, and without adding tons of additional card

[OH2TH]

@Sharkys

any chances to have BLE finally working

Working bluetooth would be really nice.

[OH2TH]

Will there be SDK support to set the enum list values?
Ref: adding, removing capabilties, flows values · Issue #246 · athombv/homey-apps-sdk-issues · GitHub

[Peter_Kawa]

Port forwarding

1. How can Athom show / prove the safety of using the port forwarding feature to enable local cloudless Homey access from anywhere?

2. Why aren’t users warned about the high risks it involves?

3. What is the point of this feature, when we still need the Athom cloud to authenticate?

4. How many % of all users requested this ‘popular’ feature exactly, and why was it prioritised?
   I mean there were/are many other issues to solve with a higher prio (zwave, zigbee, Ble, the Wifi “offline” issues, a less sluggish v8.x app and so on)

5. When someone or something managed to get illegal access, and enters / can login to Homey; is it possible to reach the local network from Homey in any way?

6. Is there an intrusion detection and notification system / logs somewhere?

Answering with, it’s safe because it uses HTTPS, is not allowed