Will Homey survive AI Craft?

Off-Topic
21

If you think Home Assistant is basically Homey running on different hardware, then I think you are missing the point.

They are two very different philosophies.

Homey has things like Advanced Flow and a much more polished, simplified interface designed to make complex functionality approachable for normal users.

Home Assistant, on the other hand, has vastly more power, flexibility and possibilities under the hood.

And that difference matters.

A system designed to be 100% user-friendly will always impose certain limits by design. Apple is a good example: Final Cut Express was once a simplified version of professional editing software. Apple eventually dropped it in favour of iMovie, which offers only a fraction of the flexibility but can be understood by almost anyone within minutes.

That is the kind of distinction I am talking about.

Home Assistant and Homey are not the same product with different hardware. They target different priorities.

What I am imagining is an open-source Homey-like system: keeping Homey’s strongest advantages — simplicity, polished UX and something like Advanced Flow — while running on standard hardware and potentially improving the implementation over time.

Not Home Assistant.

A different product with the same philosophy of simplicity as Homey.

22

HA is now using Matter 1.6.1 and is certified.
Homey is still Matter 1.5 certified
:wink:

23

I don’t really understand what you mean by this comment. My vibe-coded app with 0 stars on GitHub will never get any kind of certification or brand partnerships for anything. This topic is about AI created/vibe coded smart home apps, how can those get certified when everyone just builds their own app? And keep in mind that it also costs money, which Home Assistant can probably get via the ridiculously overpriced cloud subscriptions. But all that does is hurt consumers since they are the ones paying way too much for something as simple as a relay service

24

I think you are taking my reply completely out of context.

My comment was a response to someone else claiming that an open-source Homey-like platform would have a problem because it could not get Matter certification.

Your own GitHub application with zero stars is therefore not really a useful comparison. Nobody claimed that every hobby project or every smart-home application needs Matter certification in order to work.

Of course Matter certification costs money. But we are not talking about astronomical amounts or a fee for every installed hub.

For a serious community project, the cost is quite manageable. A community of 15,000 users could probably fund a certification with something in the region of a one-time $1 contribution per user, depending on the final lab costs.

And there is an even more important point:

You do not necessarily have to build and certify your own Matter stack from scratch.

The Open Home Foundation Matter Server used by Home Assistant has its own Matter certification, independent of Home Assistant itself, and it is explicitly designed so that other projects can use it as well.

So an open-source smart-home project could build on an already certified Matter Server instead of reinventing and recertifying the entire Matter implementation.

And your repeated reference to Home Assistant’s supposedly “ridiculously overpriced cloud subscription” has no real relevance here either.

The subscription is optional. Home Assistant does not require it to function, and nobody is forced to pay for it.

If a serious open-source Homey alternative ever attracted a sufficiently large community, I see no reason why it could not also attract voluntary financial contributors — whether through one-time donations, recurring subscriptions, sponsorships, crowdfunding or any other model.

That is how many open-source projects are financed.

So yes, certification requires money, organisation, testing and maintenance.

But neither the cost of Matter certification nor the fact that a project is open source makes such a platform unrealistic.

Edit: We talked about the new “Craft” wave. Once these apps are ready for everyday use, I’d happily pay a small monthly fee, say €5, to support their development. Together they cover most of what Adobe and Microsoft Office offer, and people already pay those two companies a lot of money. So why wouldn’t they pay a fraction of that to keep an open-source alternative alive?

There’s already a model that proves it works: I pay for Nabu Casa mainly to support Home Assistant, which itself is free. Bundle a few useful extras like sync, collaboration or support, and a small subscription could make projects like this sustainable.

And, the Craft apps already have a paid service. AI generated images. Projects can stay free and be financed by optional services, no user must use.

25

Yes, luckily you don’t need Matter for a smart home app (mine doesn’t support local connections since it’s more like ifttt). But most vibe coded (or “AI Craft” as you call them) apps will never get any kind of certification or brand partnerships at all.

26

@Pascal_Nohl @smarthomesven Please, can I politely ask you to take your discussions somewhere else? In every thread you guys are involved in we get the same back and forth between you two and I personally am fed up with your discussions popping up everywhere on this forum. This is a Homey support forum, not a Matter / AI / Home assistant certification discussion forum.

Rant over :slight_smile:

27

Sorry, but I can’t really let that stand as a general accusation against me.

Just look at how many times I have asked Sven not to bring the same Home Assistant subscription and “cloud is better” argument into unrelated discussions again and again.

That repetition is exactly what keeps dragging threads in the same direction.

And I don’t think it is fair to suggest that my posts simply bother everyone else either. Quite a few of them get positive reactions and likes, so clearly there are also people who find the discussions useful.

I could also simply leave the community and stop maintaining my five Homey apps and supporting their users. Comments like yours are exactly the kind of thing that can push people who are still trying to contribute, maintain their work and help other users in that direction.

Yes, it is a Homey forum.

But like most forums, it also has an Off-Topic / Lounge area — and that is exactly where this discussion is taking place.

If someone is not interested in that topic, the easiest solution is simply to skip it and move on to another thread.

This is also a recurring behaviour I notice here: a certain amount of fanboyism and protectionism around Homey whenever competing systems or technologies are discussed.

Fortunately, I experience much less of that in the Home Assistant community, where discussing the strengths of other platforms tends to be seen more as an opportunity to learn than as something that needs to be defended against.

28

I would love to skip it, I would love to have the option to just ignore your posts or this thread.

Problem is that every time this thread shows up in the “unread” list. And at some point this gets annoying to me to a point I need to react. :slight_smile:

This is not about fanboyism, or protectionism at all. I really don’t care if someone else likes Homey or not.

As a Homey user I am simply not interested in discussing these kind of topics about “the future of Athom”, “will AI replace Homey”. You, however, seem to be more or less obsessed by it and starting topics about it again and again with lengthy posts, which in the end always lead to the same outcome: you and other people going round and round in circles with the same arguments.

29

You can always try this if you like:


Ignore User
Duration: Time setting

Please note that all ignores are automatically removed after the ignore duration expires.
30

Yes, I’m also not interested in any post about that, or posts about Home Assistant or any other competitors. This is a Homey forum, and Homey is the best smart home system.

…that are (probably) also written by AI :wink:

Appearantely the same thing happened on the Hubitat forum (from the same user) in this topic.

31

@Pascal_Nohl @smarthomesven Like a broken Record :rofl: But it indeed makes the threads unreadable.

32

Come on. You are an adult and certainly intelligent enough to read the title of a thread when it appears under New and decide whether it interests you.

If you find the topic completely uninteresting and have no opinion you actually want to contribute, why do you keep reading it — and even posting in it?

You always have the option to ignore a discussion. So please just do that.

Then stop reading this thread.

I am interested in opinions about the subject, including opinions that disagree with mine. What I am not interested in is the argument that a discussion is somehow worthless simply because you personally are not interested in it.
Other people clearly are.

And today, progress is not only about inventing something completely new. It is also about looking at what others do well, learning from it and adopting good ideas.
The success of a company also depends on how well it anticipates the future, evaluates risks and reacts before problems become serious.

So yes, a discussion about AI, competitors, possible alternatives and the future direction of Athom is also a discussion about the future of your smart-home platform.

Expecting a discussion in the Lounge to stop because it does not appeal to you is neither constructive nor reasonable. It is much easier for you to ignore one thread than to expect everyone else to stop discussing a topic they find interesting.

33

Then I genuinely don’t understand why you reply to almost every one of my posts with the same comments about subscriptions and cloud.

You must have repeated those arguments more than a dozen times by now, and just as many times you have been told — not only by me, but by several other contributors — why those claims are incomplete or simply not relevant to the discussion.

So why keep doing it?

You say you are not interested in Home Assistant, competitors or these discussions, yet you repeatedly enter exactly those threads and bring the same arguments back again.

That wastes your time, my time and everyone else’s time.

At this point I really have to ask whether you are actually interested in the discussion, or whether you are simply trying to provoke the same argument over and over again.

If the topic genuinely does not interest you, then the simplest solution is the one you just suggested yourself: ignore it.

34

Please stop talking about situations you don’t actually know and have only formed an opinion about from a distance.

What happened on the Hubitat forum was completely different.

I supported that platform for years. I repeatedly asked them to implement proper TRV support and to make some fairly basic improvements to the underlying CSS layer of the dashboards. These were not exotic requests — many users had asked for the same things.

Nothing happened.

Then Hubitat advertised Matter compatibility while Matter was effectively implemented through individual device drivers in a way that, in my view, missed one of the core ideas of Matter interoperability.

When I pointed out that the Matter logo is reserved for certified products and that I could not find the hub in the CSA certification database, the discussion escalated badly.

I was attacked, humiliated and eventually banned by official Hubitat staff.

That is why I left Hubitat.

Not because I suddenly decided that every other platform was better, but because the problems remained unresolved and I no longer accepted the way users were being treated.

That is absolutely not what is happening here.

I am still here.

I still maintain five Homey apps and support their users.

I still think Homey is a very nice and interesting platform.

I have simply evolved, and Home Assistant has become the better platform for a geek like me and for the level of automation I now want to build.

That doesn’t mean I suddenly hate Homey.

I am simply not a fanboy who believes that Homey must be the perfect solution for everyone and every use case.

And that is exactly the mindset I increasingly see in your comments: if somebody prefers another platform or criticises Homey, you seem to treat that as if they must be wrong.

I am a little older, and one thing I have learned is that there is rarely one universal truth.

Different people have different requirements, and different platforms can be better for different users.

That should not be controversial.

35

I did. But at some point I had to voice my opinion about useless discussions in this community cluttering the timeline.

No they are not. In case you haven’t noticed it is always the same very small group of people responding to your posts, repeating the same arguments over and over.

I don’t expect the discussion to stop. I only wanted to point out to you that this discussion is going round in circles again, just like all the previous threads about the same kind of topics you started. This whole thread is not constructive at all. :slight_smile:

I will go back to “ignore” mode now. :slight_smile:

36

YES!

37

Very mature.

38

I thought you are on ignore mode :wink: