Why does Athom B.V not pay those who voluntarily develop the apps?

Apps
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41

As a developer, I think Homey should take a different approach to app development.

I do not think Homey needs to pay developers directly. However, I do think there should be a safe and official system, similar to Apple’s App Store, where developers can choose to sell their apps if they want to. Homey could take a fair percentage of the price, and developers who invest a lot of time and effort would at least have the option to be compensated.

Personally, this is not really about money for me. I have PayPal donations enabled, and almost nobody donates even a few euros — and that is fine. I mainly develop because I enjoy it and because I want to create useful tools for the community.

What is much more restrictive for me is the certification process.

I fully agree that Homey should check apps for malware, security risks, stability problems, memory leaks, bad coding practices, and anything that could harm the user experience. That makes sense and is important.

But at the moment, the process seems to go further than that. Apps are also compared against existing apps, and if your app has two or three Flow cards that are somewhat similar to another app, you may be asked to collaborate with the other developer.

But what if that developer does not want to cooperate? What if you do not want to collaborate? What if the apps only share a few similar cards but are otherwise completely different in purpose, structure, quality, or philosophy?

In my opinion, this actively blocks developers, and that should not happen. Even if two developers create apps with partially overlapping functionality, users should be allowed to choose which app they prefer.

This becomes even more frustrating when users of your test version — which is not even easy to find in the store — encourage you to continue development and ask for more features, but the certification process still blocks or delays the app.

I am currently experiencing this for the second time. I have to argue and explain again and again, without even knowing whether the app will finally be certified.

For active developers, this is extremely frustrating. After investing days or weeks into development, preparing icons, images, descriptions, translations, documentation, and everything else required to submit an app, you still end up hoping that certification will accept it.

That kind of uncertainty can really make you step back and question whether it is worth developing future apps for Homey at all.

Maybe my time would be better invested in Home Assistant development instead.

42

I doubt that any of those things are actually checked.

And yet, the number of separate Yale or Tuya apps in the app store is just comical. The guideline that there should be only one community app per brand is clearly not relevant anymore, so I have no idea why they’re splitting hairs on flow cards.

43

I offer all my apps for free (without donation option) because I only build the apps because I like developing the Homey apps and reverse engineering the mobile apps, etc. Since I can’t guarantee that the apps will keep working (almost all of my apps use a reverse engineered API from the mobile app, which can break anytime without prior notice of course).

I have published many apps which already had a similar app in the App Store, I’ve never had issues with it. However, I do have to mention that they were using completely different backends (f.e. Duux Gen2, HomeWizard Link, HomeWizard Cleaner, ThirdReality Hub).

I do think that community developers should be allowed to publish to Homey Cloud without collaboration with the brand. I think the Homey Cloud guidelines for ease of use are great (most of my apps follow these already), but the rule that requires the brand to allow the publishing is a bit too strict IMO.

44

That is exactly the point.

I can fully understand that Homey does not want three different Shelly apps if Shelly already has an official app. For brand-specific integrations, that makes sense.

But here we are talking about apps that provide general functionality, not apps for a specific brand or device.

My app, for example, has a card called “Calculate and compare”. At first glance, it may look similar to a simple comparison card, because it can compare one value with another using operators such as equal, greater than, lower than, and so on.

But the main feature is different: both sides of the comparison can contain mathematical formulas and Homey tags. So it is not just comparing two fixed values. It allows users to calculate, transform, and then compare values in one card.

For Homey, however, this card seems to be considered identical to other cards that simply compare two values.

The app contains around 30 helper cards. About 25 of them are unique, while maybe 5 provide common basic functions such as “Invert value”. I am fully aware that some of these basic cards already exist in other apps.

But I do not want users to install my app and then also install another app just to get such a basic helper function. The purpose of the app is to provide an all-in-one toolbox for Flow and Advanced Flow users.

In my opinion, some overlap in generic helper functionality should be acceptable, especially when the app as a whole has a different scope, a different structure, and provides many unique features.