8mo ago

The little smart home platform that could

www.theverge.com The little smart home platform that could

With a new ownership structure, Home Assistant is making its next big move

Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.

The little smart home platform that could How Home Assistant plans to transition from an enthusiast platform to a mainstream consumer product.

www.theverge.com /24135207/home-assistant-announces-open-home-foundation

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115 comments

Is HA not already the mainstream option for privacy and user control? Maybe I just live in a bubble, but it seems like it's already the go-to if you care about those things.
- I took it to mean they're going to put it in prettier packaging, simplifying its use for the average Joe.
  
  I have been using it for years and still find some things confusing. Like idk why it's so hard to figure out how to customize the dashboard and create new widgets for it. I've been a professional web dev for 8 years and if I'm struggling with it, you can bet most people aren't even going to bother. Idk what's so hard about providing simple html, css, and js like every other web framework.
  
  I'm totally cool with that. Even as a more technically-minded user, I see a lot of things that could be way more streamlined.
- For technical people... Yes.
  For people who aren't that technical? No.
  Don't get me wrong, the Home Assistant Green and SkyConnect dongle is great and massively makes maintenance for the regular joe easier (no pis or other hardware that loads from the SD/hardware considerations).
  But some stuff in UX would have to improve, which it already is doing ofcourse.
  
  You would need to make touching a config file non existent. They've improved this over time, but not quite there I imagine.
  
  As a technical person working in tech, I’ve heard of home assistant but only ever spoken to one or maybe two people that have actually tried it. It doesn’t seem that mainstream. Meanwhile, every smartphone has a proprietary assistant built in.

I run it in a docker container and it works great.
- For others, beware that in a docker, each plugin needs its own docker container.
  I run everything in docker except for HA which I run in a VM (HaOS) which makes it super easy to use.
  Edit: by plugins I meant add-ons
  
  Yeah. I ran it in docker for years and it was such a hassle compared to HAOS. The switch to VM was best decision I made regarding HA.
  
  That's not true at all.
  
  each plugin needs its own docker container.
  What are you talking about? This is simply not true.

To become mainstream the install process for a fully featured setup needs massive work.
- You can buy preinstalled hardware like the Home Assistant Green if you aren't up for it. I don't think you can really make it much simpler without just selling the hub itself.
  
  I’m still confused by the different versions of HA. Does that version include all of the features? Or is it the basic install that’s easiest to install?
- In what way? It's dirt simple to get started.
  
  For you maybe. You think your grandma could set up home assistant?

I like the idea of Home Assistant. I just can't be arsed to set it up.
- I was of the same mindset for a long time; SmartThings, Hue and Google Home all worked well enough together to do what I wanted. But holy shit, Home Assistant is on another level and I only wish I'd installed it sooner.
  The only real downside is that it makes home automation somewhat addictive and, by extension, expensive. I spend quite a lot of my time thinking about how to automate more of the things, and have a never ending list of stuff that I want to add to my setup.
  
  Oh it's not as bad as your making it. My water sensors were only about $20 - $30 shipped and I mean if you're going to make an order you might as well get that $30 z wave extender so the fence gate sensors I spent $40 on have good coverage. I pair those with about $100 in temperature and humidity sensors for the attic, garage and freezers. I mean I needed to justify the SDR I picked up for like $45 you know. My $20 garage opener has also made life that much simpler. Wait how much have I spent already?
  
  Addictive is right. I'm in the process of building myself a smart mailbox with a couple proximity sensors and an ESP32. It's been quite the undertaking, and quite expensive if you count the tools I bought for the project.
- If you're down on the "editing YAML until you're blue in the face" part, they've pretty much transitioned entirely to a good UI for that. Going into the yaml is rare now. I was of the same opinion a year or so ago, but tried it and it's improved immensely in the last year for configuring things. There's room left for improvement, but it's usable now.
- The first time I did it, it was a shitshow. Then I started over and it worked fantastically. YMMV

Can't wait to ditch Google Home. Nothing to do with their warmongering. Just hate that the assistant is such a dumb removed.
Thankfully someone is going to make a localish smart speaker.
- The hardware still looks so great, but responsiveness has gone to the shitter in recent years.

I've dabbled a little with it, but I really want something that's as easy to use & set up as the commercial offerings like Google Home and Amazon Echo. I want to have an interface where I can connect my light bulbs, and have little hockey pucks that will listen for a wake word and do what I ask of it, and play my music. I also want to be able to get under the covers and do something that solves an odd problem that might come up.
I'm very hopeful for the project and I do think it will get there eventually.
- Ease of setup in exchange for google/amazon spies in your house and your data. Seems like a very bad deal to me.
  It’s really not that hard to setup for a basic setup and after that it’s working problem free with all kinds of manufacturers devices, not just one brand.
  
  "Ease of setup in exchange..." I think people tend to forget what "ease" is for others. This is nothing against you as I agree with your statement but I work a job where doctors can't figure out how to even unplug a keyboard.
  We tend to associate just being on a social media platform and typing on a computer with tech literacy. Not saying you did this just using it as an example. I think ease comes with more than just setup it comes with dealing or having patience with that setup.
  We use Home Assistant in our house but I also have Google Assistant and even with Home Assistant I still find there are many more things to troubleshoot that Google Assistant just doesn't give me problems with.
  For example it updated and our Camera just stopped being viewable outright and the time and money it actually took to fix that and yes I said money because it had to do with our camera hardware and upgrade on Internet service. So not directly Home Assistant but indirectly to fix it we had to buy another camera. Where Google Assistant just works.
  I don't see anything wrong with the users statement either. All kinds of FOSS apps and services offer ease of use setup and platforms. I am not sure Why Home Assistant couldn't be set up to do some easy to add integration as well or offer competing products against things like Google Assistant aside from cost and not being a hardware company.
  If the idea is to be inclusive the being easy as an exchange is a reasonable request from an end user. We also forget people don't have the hardware or time to learn to self host. Some of us have day to day jobs that don't involve this kind of understanding as well as kids, etc. Ease of use as an exchange is why many platforms the Lemmy community doesn't understand are so popular and maybe open source platforms should adopt that mentality somewhat to bring more people in.
  You can live in both worlds and want the other world to give you something another world might. However, don't get me wrong I don't disagree with you. Home Assistant isn't terribly difficult to learn but if I were to hand it to my parents I would be doing it for them. There is also a laziness to be said that can be attributed to people not wanting to learn to set up something like this but I don't believe that to be the same as entitlement as a consumer is entitled to want more from a product.
  Anyways, I have said my bit and this isn't meant to be an argument just providing my perspective. I would argue we should stop nagging people about "easy isn't a good trade off." Easy is why so many services people hate on Lemmy are so popular and there is nothing wrong with ease. We should encourage easy in products we want more people to be a part of and companies to engage with users to make those products easier because in the end it makes Doctors life easier and easier for me to recommend to someone with no experience in the world of open source and self hosting. It also brings competition to the table and awareness can spread if something is easier to use and recommend. I wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to my girl friend as an example because what she does for a living is type in excel spreadsheets and word docs but I wouldn't expect her to deal with home assistant and that is not against her because she is absolutely intelligent and does all sorts of things with numbers I can't even as someone in IT who should be able to do so. She absolutely and 100% could figure it out but why would she when her life doesn't pertain or really care about things as such because those things aren't as open as something like Echo's platforms and Google Assistant which makes setup and access easy to use?
  
  Privacy issues aside, for wider adoption the user experience needs to be better. Most people don't want to be a sysadmin for their house, they just want to live in it.
- The problem is that commercial entities have the leverage to get hardware makers to design stuff for their environnement. It's the same issue Linux has vs. Windows. Mostly, it works great when you use things that conform to standards. But sometimes you'll hit an edge case. All in all, it's a small price to pay.
  
  Sure, but if I had a Pi (or similar board) with a speaker and a mic, I'd hope to be able to do the same thing. A Pi Zero would definitely be able to do the job.
  
  Hopefully, home assistant will get big enough that they will be impossible to ignore. With an estimated 1 million installs currently running worldwide, they're probably not there yet. At 5m though? Probably. 10m? Definitely.
  They've mostly got the hardware right now and are developing more. A more mobile friendly and noob friendly unboarding process is really all they need.
- Isn't that something like what this product is solving for? https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3
  You can get your smart speaker and wake words with this. Integration with a voice recognition model and home assistant and you're golden.
  
  I'll take a look at that, thanks. It's been a year or so since I last looked at it but back then there was a push button that you could use but I couldn't get it going.
- They're working on a smart speaker. Says so in this very article.
  
  Yeah, that's why I said I'm very hopeful. It says so in my comment.

That could what?? 🥺
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Engine_That_Could
  
  First time I'm seeing this

They have the 'Nabu Casa' entity, which I thought was doing well. Last I heard, all their subscriptions were doing well, as were the dedicated devices they sell. Don't see them doing anything but accelerating growth as interest in this space, availability of useful devices grows.
- Their biggest risk right now is doing something to lose the trust of the community. Most users have zero money actually invested in home assistant, as opposed to something like Alexa and Google home. That makes it a lot easier to jump ship to an alternative. I think that's a big part of why they've started the foundation.

I had it briefly up and running and can only say... it's a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I'm sure I'll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.
If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I've somehow collected over time.
It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that's so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I'll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don't think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.
That said, if you're doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.
- It's not really a "bear", but it IS highly configurable down to the tiniest detail, so requires a certain level of technical expertise. Definitely not for a novice, but that's what Amazon, Apple, and Google try to cover. I will say there are other options out there that are great for offline home automation, but HA is the most competent and complete.
  
  I'd argue it's a bear and I still use it. YAML is just fucking awful and I'm glad they've been hiding it more and more over the years but it's still there. Zwave is still wildly confusing compared to something like a Hubitat which is just plug and play (guess who has to just rebuild his Zwave stuff from scratch). It's also insanely organized where add ons are different than integrations, and are hidden in different menus, as are system functions and just... It's a mess from UX POV. It's also a nightmare to try to interact with the codebase or documentation or even ask questions, much less make a suggestion. As an aside to address the point of the article, I have absolutely zero worry that they will ever forget about power users, because I, and many other power users who have interacted with Paulus on boards before agree he is kind of an asshole who absolutely does not understand why anyone would want to do anything different than how he imagines it - including documentation or UX or whatever. Home Assistant is totally safe for power users.
  Now of course I'm not trying to say it's bad, just that it is kind of a bear even for the tech savvy. You can't beat HA for being able to interface with absolutely anything. There's almost always already an integration written. It can do anything, and if you're persistent enough you can kludge together a solution that works in exactly the way you need. You might even be able to hide all the kludge from your spouse. It's also all free, because Paulus and a hundred other devs contribute their time for free and they're amazing for it. Absolutely awesome for power users. But being simple or easy just isn't one of its many, many pros.
- I bought a dedicated mini PC for it, and if you just manage it using proxmox it's pretty straightforward (if you already know how to do Linux things and paste the right commands from the tutorial in there).
  There's still stuff I need to fix to make it the only smart home controller, right now I have a ton of different stuff (switchbot, meross, Google home and HA).
- I installed it in a VM that's running Unraid. It was pretty simple to set up that way. The hardest part was figuring out how to pass through the USB controller to the VM. Side note: if you're building a home server, you should look into getting an extra PCI USB controller so you can dedicate them to different VMs if needed (or leave one for the host to use).
  For routing to the open Internet, there's a handy addon in HA to connect to Cloudflare Tunnel. It works great. The only catch is you need a domain name registered with Cloudflare. Of course, not needed if you only want to control it from LAN-connected devices.
  
  If you don’t want to deal with remote access hosting (which can be pretty involved), their cloud service Nabu Casa is $5 and this is exactly the functionality it provides - they don’t host your instance (you still need somewhere to run it locally, like a Pi or one of their devices) but it tunnels your instance out to their managed hosting and you can access it from any Internet connection.
  
  That was the point that hit my limit, now that you mention it -- getting it to show up on a duckdns address on the https public internet. Not being able to make that work after fiddling with all kinds of contradictory guides nor with 2 or 3 completely different reverse proxy tools just left me mad. Especially since a regular ngix reverse proxy manager container works fine on the same computer, but for some reason was just refusing to connect to HA (SSL issues, I think).
  Having HA just working locally didn't really make it a replacement for the big tech solutions that already work fairly smoothly. I'm sure I'll go back to get it the way I want one day, but the learning curve on any selfhosting is still pretty rough.
- Addons are just docker containers at the end of the day so as long as you know how to spin up a docker container, you're not adding much. And as long as you know how to spin up a docker container I don't think you'd have much issue getting the dockerized version working.

I wish it had better SSO integration with keycloak
- Thanks for volunteering to build a new integration for HA! I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
  
  Some have tried working on this. Authentik even developed a hack to make it work with HomeAssistant. Unfortunately the core devs of HomeAssistant have historically viewed external auth as a niche feature that users don't care about.^[https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/832#issuecomment-1328052330] Not sure if that is still the case, but until that mentality changes we are stuck with native auth because PRs are just going to get denied.
  I think this post pretty much sums it up:
  In 2024, Home Assistant sticks out like a sore thumb among FOSS projects for its lack of modern authentication and authorization.
- This has been a long requested feature, there are libraries out there that make this easier for apps so that if you implement the library it will allow pretty much any SSO protocol...but this would need someone with coding skills to implement
  https://community.home-assistant.io/t/open-letter-for-improving-home-assistants-authentication-system-oidc-sso/494223/119

I hope it won't go closed source
- There's way too many open source licenses involved to then pivot to closed source.
  
  GPLs?

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Home Assistant is known for its unmatched power and flexibility, but so far the platform, which has an estimated one million users, has struggled to reach the mainstream.
The foundation will also advocate for the development of “better” smart home products, says Schoutsen, “Devices with local APIs and that are built sustainably.
The launch of the for-profit Nabu Casa five years ago provided a revenue stream for Home Assistant through an optional cloud computing service that now supports 33 full-time employees.
Nabu Casa will continue as a for-profit entity running the cloud and selling Home Assistant hardware and will operate as a commercial partner of the foundation.
“Our articles state ‘There will be no direct distribution to members in return for activities performed for the association or as any other form of gratuity in any kind,’’’ he says.
In the meantime, Matter is also providing other platforms — such as Aqara, Homey, and Hubitat — the tools to expand and grow into more viable alternatives to big tech in the smart home.
The original article contains 1,317 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Bit of a detour but Companies need to realise that AI needs to work FAST and have access to ALL the periphery that is available to the user to effectively put itself in our situation. This requires insane trust. This and the fastness aspect requires AIs to work offline only.

I'm not sure "Open Home Foundation" was the best name to give a privacy focused advocacy program. It kind of sounds like the opposite.

How’s HA compare to Hubitat? I like the offlineness of hub, but I’m not a programmer and setting a lot of stuff up often feels like a chore.

Uh oh...

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