Hi,
I just wanted to leave a quick goodbye to the forum.
I have always been very been a very critical user of Homey. A few years ago, I decided to purchase a Homey for a few reasons (in random order)
- Athom is a Dutch company, which is important to me
- I wasn’t familiar with any form of domotica and I didn’t want to start off with a very complex mechanism
- I didn’t want to have a lot of different hubs/bridges etc.
- I wanted to have something that ‘just works’ and didn’t want to have to put a lot of effort in to get things started.
When I first started, I was happy-ish. I purchased a few KAKU-devices (to keep the costs low) and a few Philips Hue bulbs, which my friends used and I really liked. Technically it all worked fine, be it very slow (the KAKU devices needed almost 1 second to switch on a light), but in the end you get used to that of course.
When I was getting more familiar and wanted to get more out the Homey sphere, I quickly ran into the issue that everything too limited. When I wanted something more than “When I click this button, make this happen (turn on a light)”, I needed ridiculous amounts flows to get things done. 3rd-party apps like “Better Logic” were an absolute necessity to get it working how I wanted to have it. Then after a while, I finally managed to get things the way I wanted and Athom decided to drop their web interface/desktop app.
Now I needed to manage my complex flows combinations on a phone. The web interface that they created after a lot of complains, wasn’t as user-friendly as the one they had at first, but after some time I got used to it and started using more 3rd party apps like , , Transitions, Collections and Homey Heating.
From the start and up to the last moment I used Homey, I was really disappointed that the functionality of all of those 3rd party apps wasn’t in the core product (maybe except for Homey Heating, as that is rather specific). So rather then making a strong and diverse core product, Athom keeps on adding support for all kinds of niche products like Perfume diffusers and half-integration of stuff like Dyson fans.
This has always been my main issue with Homey. The core system is very very limited. The only way to get things done via flows in a ‘If this (plus A and/or B) then that’ way, etc. (what they call the ‘power of Homey’ is the ‘weakness of Homey’ to me). Also the issues with the Zigbee stack, which they never got stable after so much time. And up to a short time ago, we weren’t even able to create backups of our flows.
Something else that has always bothered me, was that there was no real ‘user-interface’. Only a few glorified management interfaces, partially on a phone and partially via web interfaces (developer page and insights effectively are desktop-only web interfaces) but no end-user interface like a dashboard.
When they introduced the ‘Cloud-only’ backup (where they advertise that everything is always, only in Homey) I decided I needed something else. That was the straw that broke my camel’s back.
I did some quick research and bought a raspberry pi, a conbee2 and a z-wave controller stick and started getting myself familiar with Home Assistant. After getting the hang of it, I actively migrated everything towards there and everything works how I want it to and everything is a lot more responsive (bulbs and switches respond faster. This is not ‘just my feeling’. My mother who looks after my infant remarked on it and she didn’t even know I was working on anything.
The one thing that I did always like, was the activeness and dedication of the people on this forum. We didn’t always agree, and one of the (former) moderators did have a real attitude issue (always jumped in with a straight leg, two on a bad day), but his dedication and the amount of time and energy he put into the forum was very commendable. Most people here on the forum always wanted to help out when needed.
With this post, I just wanted to let you all know, what made me decide to migrate away from Homey. I did not want to bash or degrade anything or anyone. Just voicing my opinion on the product, nothing more and nothing less. (so please don’t use this thread to start bashing at Homey or Athom again. There are more than sufficient other threads on that topic 
)
That leaves me with one more thing to say: Thank you and goodbye.
P.S. @moderators . Can you please anonymise and ‘disable’ my account?
