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Traditional home automation - Crestron et al - is the absolute wild west. Business models are overwhelmingly based around hardware sales, lock in, and customer retention through obfuscation and control. This applies to both manufacturers and integrators.

You won't find a professional integrator to take on a home-assistant based project as the economic incentive is not there. There are some good independent devs but most avoid resi due to volatility and relatively small projects compared to commercial.

Which is an absolute shame because in the end it just causes many more millions to be wasted on re-building yet another somewhat "complete" automation solution with a different vendor lock-in that will become obsolete in 5 years.

In the long run, this business model will just not fly in a world with today's connection requirements.

I wonder if the Home Assistant boxes will help. Getting HA used to mean installing it yourself. Installer would need to come up with custom hardware. Now, they can buy Blue and Yellow and start from there.

I develop things for HomeAssistant. The stuff I develop for free can be a hassle to support, so I don't see myself earning a good wage while being happy working on HomeAssistant for non-engineers.

I don't think HA is for you, then. The whole idea behind it is to go online, buy a bunch of cheap actuators and sensors from different vendors, and try to make them work together in one system. It's never going to be as reliable as a coherent system from a vendor like Crestron. But it's also much cheaper and 'flexible', of course.

My rather basic home automation system has devices from more than ten different vendors on two networks (Zigbee, Wifi, soon probably Thread), many of which communicate with custom protocols. It's a wonder that it's working as well as it is.

Also, HA is developing at a breakneck speed. They release new iterations eleven times per year. Reading the release notes is a must, as many releases change things in subtle ways that might break your system.

That's what I'm talking about.

I want the flexibility and hackability. I don't mind paying $50 instead of $10 reliable hardware.

I don't want the lock-in of Crestron.

the only thing unreliable about HA is that occasionally, updates can break things. Otherwise it has been rock solid for me. Put it on an Intel nuc style device with high quality SSD and you should be good for a long time.

> occasionally, updates can break things

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theatre?

Nowadays your phone, computer, fridge and even your car get software updates that can break things. Having to keep track of one more device probably won't ruin anyone's life that much more.

Also, Home Assistant updates rarely break stuff (I haven't had anything break since I started with it two years ago), and you can always not update for a few weeks.

To be honest Home Assistant is not as "Set and Forget" that could be Philips Hue for example. I could totally see me help relatives to set up a Hue system, or thinking about making a business out of it. Regarding Home Assistant, I have a very basic set up but the few times it breaks after update or randomly shut down without notice would make support a nigtmare for me to engage non tech savy friends in it. Let's be honest, it's hard to imagine a business relying on it for the moment. Way too unreliable and time consuming.

I think that's largely because they're not targeting non-techical users at the moment. However, I think in the years I've been using HA, things have been moving more in that direction.

Philips Hue is very stable when it comes to controlling the lights via Zigbee and them meshing properly. The customer facing part (mobile app, cloud integrations, etc.) though... whole another story. Not to mention the relatively frequent and sometimes almost arbitrary changes to their app and stuff like forcing you to have a registered account now.

Yes, Home Assistant is not in the same ballpark at the moment but their all-in-one hardware bridge is actually a good point to get there in the long run. You can plonk that thing down, auto-discover all your Hue lights pretty much like in the Philipps Hue app and you're almost good to go. Scene and Room setup is a bit more cumbersome than with Hue but still doable.

I for one have moved all my Philips Hue lights to Home Assistant a while ago and never looked back. Everything runs a lot more stable, faster and I haven't had any issues with it. The only problem I've had in the past 12 months (even with regular updates) was my kitchen lights not turning on anymore and it turned out my Hue motion sensor there simply ran out of battery.

Thank you for all the infos. You just reminded me i'm a bit biased regarding Hue because I use the Third party app Iconnecthue (ios only) wich is STELLAR. Always been very ahead of Philips schedule regarding features, way more powerful, and the best balance between friendlyness and efficiency. One of the best piece of software i've been using this last decade. Thank you very much to the team. Indeed, running Hue with official software is more cumbersome and limited.

The recent move from Philips lead me to consider running everything through Home Assistant but I'm not ready yet. Configuring accessories and scene with Iconnecthue (especially splitting behaviors for week/week-end or during day) is too smooth and powerful). Also the Hue Bridge is rock solid, while my HA instance isn't. I could consider it if I were alone but i'm not. Maybe when I'll stop playing with HA and break things.

For the moment, using adaptive lightning on my Hue bridge controlled lights through HA is an incredible joy tho.

Absolutely understandable. I've actually been in the exact same situation when I was still using Philips Hue. I was using HuePro on Android, which is (or unfortunately rather, was) also an incredibly powerful and well polished application maintained by a third party. I got confused a few times when people brought up issues only to discover that the base Philips app was lagging behind a lot in functionality and user friendliness.

As it stands, I definitely understand your approach. Personally, I would also recommend any non-tech-savvy person or people who don't want to mess with it for a while to just use the Hue bridge with HA, if they were to try it out. The Hue bridge is really rock solid, no complaints there.

In case anyone else stumbles upon this and is curious, I'm now using a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle and a Raspberry Pi and at least for me, the stability of the local Zigbee network is as good as it was with the Hue bridge before.

My iPhone is the first device/system where I don’t dread an update.

Apple did a good job shifting that away from the customer. As a developer, I do dread every one of their updates.

That's entirely fair (from your perspective) and entirely correct (from the much larger community of customers perspective).

Google manages to make it weird for both the users and the devs :). You never know what an android update will remove (call recording, access to file system, etc) as a user, and devs always have to worry about minimum API support.

I didn't know iOS had a similar problem on the dev side, so I guess there's really no easy way out for mobile devs haha.

True, I'm definitely not saying Android is any better. And yes, aside from the fact that there's obviously a lot of value to be had, I have grown to simply hate mobile development for that very reason. Every vendor will make whatever change they want to at whatever point they feel like it and it's not like a desktop platform, where you usually can work around it, it sometimes simply destroys your whole business use case or selling point if you're unlucky. (At times even to just be re-introduced later as part of the OS, which is simply stealing from and destroying smaller competitors without repercussions)

You forget ios 7!

It is admittedly easy to forget things that were over a decade ago.

Automation is my day job. My home is a log cabin the woods that I heat with wood (in Canadian winters). That should give you an insider's view on the reliability and trustworthiness of home automation.

The uptime on my laptops is in years because nothing in OS updates are needed. If I'm not adding new hardware or exposing services to the public why would I need to update anything?

But go ahead and dicker with the technology as a hobby. Everyone needs one.

> If I'm not adding new hardware or exposing services to the public why would I need to update anything?

Because you might be using a web browser and/or email client to interface with the outside world...?

don't update.

desktop/phone folks want the latest and greatest software and upgrade all the time, even automatically.

server folks want nothing to change ever.

second mindset is useful.

Lots of people asking in the forums to hire someone, and the answer always amount to that it's not reliable enough to do a professional install.

Maybe it's reliable for you, however why has no one built a professional installer service on the platform?

I don't think that reliability is the issue. Hass is very reliable, it's just (IMO) a bitch to configure. There's a lot of clicking and fiddling in the not-sure-if-mobile-or-desktop web interface, the menus aren't that well structured, some stuff (less and less, to be fair) needs to be configured in YAML and you don't even get an easy way to access the main config files (there's an addon, which doesn't work for some installation methods).

So why is nobody doing this professionally?

Perhaps due to demand and the variety of system compositions possible.

I have been using HA since early days. If i have to pay someone to build it, i would be very poor. The amount of time and effort put into it, it’s insane. And environment changes regularly.

So i think there is no professional service because of the high complexity and the customers don't have much budget for this.

It is possible to assemble very specific setup of hardware and configuration that could work out of the box. Kinda like a HA distribution that has been tested rigorously against a predefined set of supported hardware systems.

Because HA has no sufficient separation between the frontend and the backend. The platform itself is stable, but the user-experience cannot be isolated

The result of a professional delivery of a HA-solution would not be the product "HA", but the custom solution that was built on top of it.

Once deployed, the solution cannot follow the maintenance cycle of the HA-backend without risking to break the frontend experience of your customer, which means unpredictable work-hours to maintain the solution (get stuff to work again, rebuilding broken functionality using new methods, etc.)

To use it professionally, one of the biggest needs would be that the frontend versioning is decoupled from the backend, so a professional could deploy your custom solution based on HA version A with frontend version A, and regardless how often HA is upgraded to version B, C, D, X, the frontend will still be version A until it is manually migrated (possibly as a paid maintenance service).

But what this means is, that alot of development effort would need to be put into backwards-compatibility to older frontends and testing of all the permutations whenever a new release of the backend is done.

The (reasonable) decision of the community is to not do that, and instead put the energy into evolving HA as a whole.

But yeah, I wouldn't want to deploy this professionally and be in fear every time a new version is released...

Harder to sell the service contracts when the user has that much control?

The problem of reliability isn't really with Home Assistant. It comes from the pain of integrating the almost-but-not-quite compatible cheap Chinese devices that claim to work with a standard, but don't.

The ecosystem is so fragmented between cheap race-to-the-bottom gadgets and the more expensive "works only with OUR app" that integrating anything more than just a few bulbs is a pain.

And that's not even considering the amount of customer support that someone doing this professionally would have to provide.

Why would installers deal with cheap Chinese devices? Every installer I’ve dealt with has a relatively small selection of vendors and devices that they know and trust. They aren’t reselling random crap from Amazon.

No, they're each having a relatively small selection of vendors re-selling white-label Chinese crap.

In my case: local A/C installers are reselling Haier aircons. Good hardware. Shit software (see "tale of the two apps" elsewhere in this thread). Or, a nice local company selling floor heating solutions. Got electric floor heating from them. Control panels have "smart home integration". Guess who made that? Tuya. The world's finest seller of white-label "smart" devices. Complete with a shit app.

Home Assistant is the only thing that makes the two device classes more convenient remotely than through an IR remote or using the wired-in control panels.

Seems like a professional could just limit their install to known reliable devices?

I've had plenty of trouble with Home Assistant upgrades randomly breaking smart devices from well known vendors, e.g. whenever I update I dread to find out whether my Neato vacuum robot is still supported or whether that integration has crapped out again. Same for my LG smart tv and several other devices. I love Home Assistant but it's not exactly rock solid...

Right there with you that the amount of customer support needed for such a service kills the incentive. I already hate having to fix my house when something breaks or a battery dies. The last thing I want is Joe Schmoe calling me up at 2am because his power went out and shorted the home server, and he has no backups because he disabled the ones I set them up with while "tinkering"

Yeah, although I have not had issues in a while, this is exactly what I don't want my home-automation system to do.

My "solution" is just to update it infrequently, but that does not feel like a very sustainable solution either.

If they ever introduced a LTS version I would jump on that straight away. My home automation needs to do not change every month. And I'd be willing to pay money for that.

But it might be that it's a bit unrealistic for this ecosystem and the amount of contributions, so I'll just keep putting off updates until I know I have time to fix it if and when it breaks.

I run my home assistant on a nuc that acts as a simple kvm hypervisor and then inside that vm I run HA as a container. It is trivially easy to backup, deploy, move around, restore to a previous state, etc.

Put it inside a vm, set updates to manual, once every few months snapshot/backup and upgrade. If it fails rollback.

This is a good idea, however one drawback is that Home Assistant sometimes needs "physical access" to devices connected to the computer that it's running on, for example Bluetooth and Zigbee dongles. Of course you can pass through such access to a virtual machine, but it does become somewhat nontrivial.

Fwiw it is rather trivial and reliable to passthrough individual usb devices in Proxmox - point and click even

One suggestion I read was HA should move to a stable release model. Keep the ongoing development for those who want to stay on the edge, but do stable releases and then backport fixes. The releases should never break with new features.

That would be a lot of effort so might make sense to have company and subscription service do the maintenance.

The thing is the selling point is it ties together loads of different systems and is open source. That is also it's weakness and I'd not want to professionally set up a system and then be at the mercy of third party integrations and have to explain that to the client and support it if it fails.

Furthermore a lot of this you'll need physical access for which limits the scope of remote support.

Once you're paying someone professional rates than the cost of the parts becomes less relevant.

I don't think HA is that unreliable itself these days but if I were charging £££ to install I'd probably want to be able to have a company with an SLA to fall back on.

I suspect there are people using it professionally however they'll be selling automation solutions and just use HA in the background rather than exposing HA to the end user.

I recently came to tho same conclusion. It doesn’t help that there is still some unreliability and ongoing stabilizarion across the various Zigbee, ZWave and Matter protocols and products, not to mention HomeKit, Alexa and Google Home/Nest services that people have invested into (this includes families, and sometimes even whole home renovations).

While that settles down, HA needs to focus on standardisation and redundancy.

First, there is so much potential from a BIM perspective, but they really ought to think about putting some frameworks in to allow exchange with industry standard modelling and data formats if they want to attract a professional market.

The Industry’s File Classes (IFC) [1] for example could let you tap into building automation, not just homes.

Second, it’s a single host service, which makes redundancy hard. What if the network goes down? What do? MQTT could allow the database and controllers to be multi-homed, but the architecture of the software itself is still a bit too tightly integrated (even if it is docker containers all the way down…)

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/File_formats_for_B...

That's an excellent point. I don't think HA is anywhere close to being something that could carry a separate professional services industry, like many more mature projects (e.g., Redis, MQTT or whatever). It's just moving too fast. But I could imagine in the future it developing a "long-term support" version model.