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.
But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the theatre?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because you might be using a web browser and/or email client to interface with the outside world...?
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.
Maybe it's reliable for you, however why has no one built a professional installer service on the platform?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
That would be a lot of effort so might make sense to have company and subscription service do the maintenance.