I got frustrated with my Hubitat hub. The interface always lacked polish, but what sent me over the edge was when it stopped being accessible locally and I had to sign up for a cloud subscription. So I bought a Homey Pro. The migration of Zwave devices has been a nightmare. I have about ½ of them moved. Most of the failures now are transmit timeouts after the Homey recognizes that there is a node to include. Most of what is failing are Jasco dimmers from 2017. And yes, I have done factory resets of the dimmers and get the blinking LED. I have tried moving the hub close to the dimmers.
So my question is this: do I buy new Zwave dimmers and if so, should I be looking at Zwave LR? Or migrate part of my system to Matter/Thread?
One reason I picked Homey Pro was to be able to voice control via Siri or Alexa.
I can’t help you directly with your specific issue, but I wanted to share my experience, as I’ve reached a similar point. I also ordered a Homey Pro after Hubitat became increasingly frustrating for me.
Since Homey is Matter-certified, my expectation is that Matter devices should work as intended. I’ve already replaced around 80% of my Z-Wave and Zigbee devices with Matter-over-Thread devices. These are currently paired with Apple Home, and that setup has been extremely stable for me.
Once my Homey arrives, I don’t plan to change this working configuration. Instead, I’ll simply share the existing Matter devices with Homey. One of the key strengths of Matter is its multi-admin capability: devices can be paired to a single Thread fabric and then securely shared with additional controllers. Each controller can then manage the devices as if they were paired natively.
While this doesn’t solve your problem directly, I hope this perspective and information might still be useful.
I wouldn’t recommend Matter, as it’s simply not stable enough yet. I would go for ZigBee. I’ve never had any issues with ZigBee. I’ve never used Z-Wave, so I have no experience with that.
I saw the official Matter logo on Homey’s website and initially assumed that this meant Homey was already certified. After checking the CSA database, I can confirm that you are right — Homey is not yet listed as Matter certified.
I then revisited the Homey website and noticed the annotation I had previously missed, indicating that Matter certification by the Connectivity Standards Alliance is currently pending.
The positive takeaway is that this suggests Homey already complies with the Matter standard and that the certification process is underway.
If you want to start over and are still looking for a stable approach, you can take a look at my overall strategy here.
Please note that this is still partly theoretical, as I’m currently waiting for my Homey Pro to arrive and haven’t been able to test the full setup yet. That said, the configuration already works very reliably even without Homey.
Apple Home automations can become quite powerful once you understand a key principle:
You first need to create a simple “If this, then that” automation in the Apple Home app (which is the only app that can create automations from scratch; third-party apps can only manage scenes). Instead of selecting the final action, you choose “Convert to Shortcut”. From there, you can build a more complex logic using nested if/then conditions, multiple devices, and additional actions. After saving it, you can open the same automation in a third-party app such as Controller, Home+ 6, or the free Eve app to add multiple triggers and conditions. The result is a fairly advanced automation that behaves much like a flow.
The reason I still want to add Homey as a higher-level controller is that Apple Home does not support system-wide variables or virtual devices. Homey can provide these features, along with more advanced flows, which allows for much more flexible logic.
An important part of my design is failover. Homey is a single controller, which naturally introduces a single point of failure. In contrast, my Apple Home setup includes two Apple TVs, two HomePods, and one HomePod mini. These act as border routers and controllers that automatically and seamlessly take over from one another if one fails, without any user interaction. From a resilience perspective, this has proven to be extremely solid.
In my concept, the system should continue to function in a simplified mode if Homey goes offline, potentially triggered by a single button. This part still needs to be validated in real-world testing.
In summary, my current setup is already very stable and handles all essential automations. Homey is intended to sit on top of this foundation and elevate the system to a more advanced, “power user” level once everything is fully tested.
My experience has been quite the opposite. My Matter-over-Thread devices have proven to be very reliable. In the rare cases where a device drops offline (which happens maybe once a year and only with battery-powered devices), simply removing and reinserting the battery has always resolved the issue.
In contrast, I experienced more issues with Zigbee devices on Hubitat. Even mains-powered devices occasionally went offline, including devices installed in wall boxes, which then required re-pairing. That said, this may not be a limitation of Zigbee itself, as Zigbee has been rock solid for me when used with a Hue Bridge and Hue devices.
It’s also worth noting that my Matter devices are currently paired with Apple Home, not Homey. For reference, my overall setup is shown here:
I’m not entirely sure how to interpret your comment.
Do you mean:
that I shouldn’t have missed this information earlier?
or that the certification has been pending for a long time without progress?
Personally, I don’t have any insight into the reasons behind this. Certification processes can sometimes take quite a while, or there may still be a few technical details being worked out. At this point, I can only speculate.
This. It gives me the impression that Athom doesn’t find it very important to get Homey certified.
I’ve always had the idea that Athom has had an ad-hoc way of implementing protocol support: what they need for their own apps (or marketing), or what parent company LG needs, gets priority.
With Zigbee this has led to a very minimal implementation, with lots of useful features (that many users have asked for over the years) left out. With Matter, Homey users might be a bit more lucky because it seems that parent company LG seems to think Matter is important, and given that they have their own LG-branded Homey, development for that device (also done by Athom, at least for the most part, I think) may trickle down to Homey.
OK, I understand. In real-world use, certification is not always the most important factor. I’ve experimented with my own ESP32-based Matter-over-Thread devices, and they worked perfectly well without being certified.
That said, I do believe certification still matters. It acts as a form of guarantee: it gives users a clear expectation of functionality and a basis for legitimate claims if something doesn’t work as defined. Without certification, there’s simply more room for interpretation.
Certification also comes at a cost — not only the certification fees themselves, but also the development effort required to meet the specification fully, not just “almost.” That can be challenging, especially for smaller companies. Partnerships with large players like LG could certainly help reduce that barrier.
As has already been mentioned here and in other threads, more and more global players are now clearly committing to Matter: Bosch, IKEA, TP-Link / Tapo, Nanoleaf, Midea, Razer, Aqara, Schlage — and even Philips Hue, which for a long time was a closed ecosystem, first turned its bridge into a Matter bridge and is now producing native Matter-enabled lights.
All of this puts significant pressure on the market. In my view, Matter has clearly moved out of the grey zone and is now on its way to becoming the new standard in home automation.
Since you don’t have your Homey yet, I’ll give you a heads-up: your devices will not work with Homey. Even though it isn’t certified itself, it demands that Matter devices are certified before they can be used
It’s not a partnership: LG owns an 80% stake in Athom, and will fully own it within the next couple of years. Which means that effort will be directed to anything that benefits LG first.
That may be true, but it’s not the full picture as far as I understand it. I recall a communication where LG explicitly stated that Athom would retain the lead on Homey, as they are the subject-matter experts, while LG would focus on integrating Homey into its broader ecosystem.
Of course, that could be genuine intent or simply marketing — time will tell. That said, I do believe the people involved are smart enough to have learned from past examples, such as what happened with SmartThings, where a large corporation fully absorbing a platform led to a noticeable shift in direction and priorities.
i use zwave because its 868mhz frequency has a good coverage in my garden shed, 50 m from the house. 4.2 ghz is a crowded band, and wifi,ble,zigbee has issues over that distance, at least at my location.
zwave takes some time to build its mesh, but its quite stable. the nightmare is to migrate.
currently i am migrating from homey cloud to shs and a bridge, but i have to dig each zwave sensor up , bring it close to the bridge and reconfigure. so i might -as a temporary means- use an iphone as wifi ap with the bridge on site. cumbersome. hopefully thread 868 is better
now i understand that thread using both, 868 and 4.2, but to me its not clear yet how it selects the operating freq.
I’ve been around enough company acquisitions to take such communications with a large block of salt. Even if it was their intent when the deal was announced, eventually the parent company will shift focus and force the subsidiaries to comply.
I think this drifts away from from the topic, but is an interesting discussion, so I created a dedicatet topic here to continue discussion : Homey acquired by LG – good or bad for users?
Here is an update on my project. I solved the Hubitat problem of not being able to access it locally by changing a setting in the Chrome browser. This was the original reason I bought the Homey.
After struggling for days with rebuilding my Zwave network in Homey, I tried doing it on the Hubitat C-5. I did 95% of it in a couple of hours.
The Homey Pro is now sunk cost for me, it does support my Hunter Douglas shades, for whatever that is worth.
