I firmly believe that at this moment, Home Assistant is the best smart home system out there. No cloud, no vendor lock-in, no data, no profiling, no lock-in with licenses and companies needing to make deals.
And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they need to get devices to work with the damn thing. The IKEA smart lamp bridge is unreliable, wake on LAN is unreliable, smart switches refuse to operate without a cloud connection, transmitted data formats are proprietary and unreliable, it all just sucks so bad.
There's work being done by FAANG (or would that be MAANG now?) to make interoperability between devices better, but knowing these companies that probably means the clouds get more integrated with each other.
These terrible internet smart devices should pick a protocol like MQTT or CoAP or whatever IoT protocol they fancy, and stick it proudly on the box. They can have their stupid internet uplink, bht they should Just Work if they're only connected locally. These things run fully fledged ESP32 chips with more power than you could ever need for a plant humidity sensor, just put a basic web interface on them that takes a password, a WiFi network and an endpoint to talk to. As for alternative protocols, companies like Phillips and IKEA should get their shit together already and just expose a good, documented API.
Home Automation is a hobby mostly practiced by the technically inclined. The more bridges and products that work with your smart fridge, the more value your fridge has to consumers.
I don’t think the fault is in Home Assistant. Ultimately, if the smart home device doesn’t cooperate by providing a standards-compliant local interface such as MQTT or similar there’s not much you can do. HA tries to do its best with integrations that reverse-engineer proprietary APIs but obviously the reliability is variable.
When it comes to devices that do cooperate I’ve found Home Assistant to be extremely reliable. Every update I’ve applied has gone through flawlessly, but the truth is that once something is set up you don’t really need to update. I’ve set one up for friends with only local devices (WIFI switches and relays) and it’s been rock-solid for a couple years now. It’s probably severely outdated now but it works fine and being behind a firewall means outside security threats aren’t an issue.
It’s been working perfectly. They don’t even know nor care how it works behind the scenes, from their perspective light switches will toggle their corresponding light, some basic automations like turning off lights after 10 minutes in common areas such as the hallway and the heating will pause in any room that has windows open.
I don't think the fault is in Home Assistant either, the fault is in the mountain of shitty hardware thag just won't cooperate.
Home Assistant does its best to compensate for the bullshit and they're doing an amazing job. Autodiscovery is a godsent and when it works, it's easily the best way to get any home automation system set up.
But if autodiscovery fails, honestly, the process is unnecessarily painful. You need to enter a lot of information and mess with settings to get things working reliably because the vendor decided to change the API between hardware revision or send invalid JSON at random.
It is absolutely the best home control system available, and it simultaneously sucks so much that it is nowhere near ready for use by non-enthusiasts.
I used to have a meticulously managed 'smart home' with HA, but after the system spontaneously self-destructed the fourth time, I ran out of motivation to spend ANOTHER weekend redoing everything.
And honestly, that's terrible. Because let's be honest, Home Assistant still kind of sucks. Not because of all the hard work the developers put into it, but because all of the hacks they need to get devices to work with the damn thing. The IKEA smart lamp bridge is unreliable, wake on LAN is unreliable, smart switches refuse to operate without a cloud connection, transmitted data formats are proprietary and unreliable, it all just sucks so bad.
There's work being done by FAANG (or would that be MAANG now?) to make interoperability between devices better, but knowing these companies that probably means the clouds get more integrated with each other.
These terrible internet smart devices should pick a protocol like MQTT or CoAP or whatever IoT protocol they fancy, and stick it proudly on the box. They can have their stupid internet uplink, bht they should Just Work if they're only connected locally. These things run fully fledged ESP32 chips with more power than you could ever need for a plant humidity sensor, just put a basic web interface on them that takes a password, a WiFi network and an endpoint to talk to. As for alternative protocols, companies like Phillips and IKEA should get their shit together already and just expose a good, documented API.
Home Automation is a hobby mostly practiced by the technically inclined. The more bridges and products that work with your smart fridge, the more value your fridge has to consumers.