A few weeks ago, I changed our central heater and in this case, also installed Tado X - besides that, I’m a 8-10 year Philips Hue and Sonos owner.
Note: from 2010 to 2017, I ran a TV-show in Denmark about “smart-stuff and gadgets" and I’m a 20+ year experienced IT-“nerd”, so the following is not due to an inability to figure out wifi, apps etc. - I absolutely THRIVE in this and WANTED it to work out for me and my family.
I regained interested in the “smart home thing” again and decided to get Apple HomeKit running (automations, integrations etc.) and tried out Smart Things to go a bit more advanced-mode. I found Home Assistant to have a much too steep learning curve and decided to get a Homey Pro, which I saw (and still see) as a kind of “Apple Home Pro”, which I already talked about being quite a surprising experience here: My first (and second) experience using Homey Pro
I decided to give it a second chance and spent A LOT of time (several hours each day) adding devices (Ikea Vindstyrka for air quality, Sonoff presence sensor, Aqara smart-plugs etc), setting up fairly advanced flows etc. and even though I like the IDEA, I have now decided to return both Homey Pro and Tado X because:
- The ecosystem (which is not something I’m blaming Homey for) is just too cumbersome. Buying new sensors etc. is still just way too complicated and to be honest, I don’t see much improvement since I did the TV-show, 10 years ago. Yes we have Matter but it seems to me like quite a let-down because the vast amount of devices still doesn’t support it. The ones that do, is still often just “Matter’ish” where you either have to accept a lot less features compared to using the manufacturers proprietary app (like Aqara FP2)
- Whenever you want to add a new device, there are so many pitfalls. I’ve already had several experiences with products being marketed as having some features just to find out, that “nah, it’s a future update” (Aqara, Sonoff etc.) where we have no idea when it will actually be delivered and in what form.
- Also, it seems very unstable in terms of API’s. I haven’t followed it closely, but it seems like Tuya recently got crippled in terms of Homey Pro usage. Also, yesterday Airthings sent out a mail that talks about how they will have to change access to their API’s so it seems we can invest quite a of money in, say, Matter devices and at any time, they can change their minds.
- The “promise” of Homey that we can implement everything inside one platform, locally hosted and will not pay memberships / recurring fees is also changing - many products are slowly introducing paid subscriptions and required cloud-functionality (like Aqara and the new G5 camera but also I see this in Tado X) where you pay full price for the hardware (both Homey and the camera / thermostats) but then have to start monthly subscriptions to the manufacturer, to get the full set of features from the product. I have no problem with being able to pay for extra features on top of the original product (like I’ve bought apps that could do more fun stuff with my Philips Hue), but core functionality is not something I will accept paying subscriptions for. Like Aqara wanting me to pay extra if I want to record the video in a certain resolution or like Tado if I want to have automations like automatically turning off the heating when nobody’s home.
- The biggest issue for me and what ended up as the main reason to forget about the smart home life style again, is regarding the automation. I quickly found it very fascinating to do different advanced flows like turning on specific lights, Sonos music etc. for my wife in the morning or changing our heating in my kids rooms when they’re at school or sleeping at friends and family. It just seems to me, that for every rule I figure out, I get several “yeah, but what if ………” that either makes the flow EXTREMELY complex or not possible anyway.
This experience taught me, that the smart-home-idea, even after 10-15 years, is still not something for me and my family. I respect that a lot of you do not agree, but in my case, it’s around $2.000 for Homey Pro, Philips Hue, Tado X etc. and soooooo many hours of setting up AND MAINTAING automations and devices and I cannot see how that would be a responsible choice.
I’ve watched a LOT of youtube videos and especially the Homey podcasts and to be honest, the amount of “well, for now it cannot do this” and “oh it would be nice if they added this”. Honestly, I think a single platform for this functionality was truly a great idea 5-7 years ago but the manufacturers of devices are working against that now.
So, I will start reverting to my old setup with physical buttons for my Philips Hue, manual control of my Sonos and “good old” thermostats for my radiators today and return the Homey, Tado etc.
