Approximately a year and a half ago, I did both a video and blog article expressing my concerns about the future of Home Assistant and the direction, or lack thereof, being taken by the developers. But some recent major announcements from Home Assistant addresses many of my initial concerns. So I felt like I needed to provide an update to revisit my original concerns.
You can go back and watch original video and read the initial article here:
As you can probably imagine, the video generated quite a bit of debate in the comments! But from the content itself, along with the comments, there seemed to be a lack of shared knowledge about the direction, goals and the future of Home Assistant... especially for the 'power users' and the flexibility we had always enjoyed.
Every year, the folks at Nabu Casa ("owners" of Home Assistant), do a livestream discussing the current state of Home Assistant, maybe a few announcements and then cover the focus or theme for the next year. There was never any real discussion about the long term goals or a roadmap of the future for Home Assistant. Well, this year was different! Many of the concerns a lot of us longer term Home Assistant users have expressed were directly addressed via some major announcements. So, for the rest of this article, I cover the themes of the original concerns, where we were "then" and where we are "now" based on this latest State of the Open Home and other changes made since the original publication of my video/article.
As always, if you prefer to watch instead of read, there is a video version of this article that also includes a few clips from the live stream and you can watch that video here: Home Assistant 2024: Fully Pardoned?
Could (or should) Home Assistant compete with 'Big Tech'?
Then:
At the time, the dev team seemed to be putting major effort into making Home Assistant much easier for beginners. From selling dedicated plug-n-play Home Assistant hardware to point-n-click automation and script editors, it really seemed like they were going after the Google Home and Amazon Alexa crowd. But Home Assistant still required a fair amount of technical skill to setup and maintain. Was this the direction? Was it the best use of limited development resources and would they every really be able to compete with "Big Tech"?
Now:
It was announced that Home Assistant now has over one million active installations! Home Assistant is now one of the "Big Tech" companies! Okay... they aren't really a Google, Amazon, Apple or Samsung, but when looking at the automated smart home market, they are definitely one of the bigger players. In the past, you'd rarely see Home Assistant mentioned in any sort of mainstream technology article about smart homes or devices. Only those "deep" articles that talked about privacy or systems like Domoticz or openHAB (yes... they are still around) would include Home Assistant. When was the last time you saw those other systems mentioned?
Now, Home Assistant is often mentioned in mainstream tech, right along systems such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple Homekit. Heck, I even heard it mentioned in a tech segment on my local news (I about fell off the couch on that one!). Congrats to Nabu Casa and all the developers for making this happen! The growth and attention now means that smart home manufacturers have taken notice and want to partner, or assure their devices are compatible, with Home Assistant. And that's a win for all of us!
How would Matter impact the future?
Then:
The first official Matter specification had just been released and all the tech companies had jumped on board as the next big thing that would allow different devices from different manufacturers to communicate locally, without the cloud. Amazon had added Zigbee/thread to their devices and Google Home had announced a beta of an advanced script editor (using YAML no less). If Matter actually pans out as promised, would much of the appeal of Home Assistant be possible with other 'less-technical' solutions including local device control and advanced automations?
Now:
Matter has been very slow to rollout, currently only supports very limited types of devices and is already showing signs of fragmentation. Some devices may provide basic functionality via Matter, but more advanced features still require use of a manufacturer's app/cloud.
Both Google and Amazon have pulled back on development of their current smart speakers and have put their focus into AI development. Amazon even considered cutting the Alexa division altogether. Google has removed more features than have been added to their smart speakers. And that advanced script editor? It is still in an open preview period and may never be rolled out as a production feature.
Meanwhile, Nabu Casa has been a part of the Matter (CSA) Alliance from the start. Home Assistant currently can act as a Matter controller (beta) and interface with Matter devices. So it is well positioned for the future if/when Matter does become a major device platform.
Would advanced features (aka YAML configurations) be squeezed out in favor of point-and-click, one-size-fits all integrations and automations?
Then:
Every month it appeared that one or more prior integrations were losing the option for custom YAML configuration in favor of a 'black box' native integration. And with the continued focus on developing a user interface (UI) for automations, scripts and helpers, was Home Assistant headed for a completely point-and-click system without the ability to do any of the advanced customization that drew many of us to Home Assistant in the first place. Now, there is nothing wrong with point-and-click to help newer users and it would appear that having baseline, system maintained integrations would be a good thing. But the trade-off is the lost of customization. With point-and-click or a one-size-fits all integration, you can only use or access what the developer provides... and only in the manner it is provided. You can no longer control or customize these entities to your particular needs. So there was a concern expressed by me... and many in the comments... that YAML automations and other advanced features may someday be removed.
Now:
Well, I actually asked the question about the future of YAML during the livestream directly to Franck Nijhof (commonly known online as 'frenck' or 'choo-choo'), engineering lead for Nabu Casa/Home Assistant. To paraphrase his response:
... I strongly believe that the UI is what made a lot of the things happen with the growth of (the) last years.. Nevertheless, I am a big fan of YAML automations... we have no plans and never made plans to remove those parts. We want automations to be accessible in YAML in case you want to do really advanced ones..."
If you want to see his full response to my question, you can watch it here.
Nothing was mentioned about advanced integrations vs. baseline, but there is a balancing act between ease-of-use and advanced features, as discussed with Paulus Schoutsen in a separate interview with The Verge when asked about these big changes for the current user base:
“We’re constantly doing this balance between ease of use and advanced features and I don’t know how we are going to keep balancing this,” he said. “But we cannot forget about our power users."
This is from a good article regarding the changes announced in the State of the Open Home. You can read the full article here.
I think it is still a bit of a 'watch point' or slight concern for many of us older Home Assistant users with major investments in YAML automations and scripts. While we may continue to lose some advanced integration options, I think YAML is going to stick around for a while.
Would Home Assistant be sold/acquired by 'Big Tech' and commercialized?
Then:
There seemed to be such an emphasis on growing the size of the Home Assistant user base by making many of the point-and-click changes, and with the fact that Nabu Casa is a for-profit organization, many were concerned that the goal was to eventually make Home Assistant attractive to a buyer and it would be acquired by a Big Tech firm and commercialized or moved to some sort of paid/subscription system. Nabu Casa/Home Assistant had never published any sort of roadmap or longer term goals so it was completely a guessing game about where Home Assistant was headed or the goals of Nabu Casa.
Now:
For me this was the biggest and most welcomed announcement from the entire live stream. A new entity, the Open Home Foundation had been formed as a not-for-profit and is now the new 'owner' of both Home Assistant and ESPHome. As a Swiss-based not-for-profit, this means it is practically impossible for either of these entities to be sold or acquired by anyone! A number of other core developed technologies, such as BTHome, ESP Web Tools and others will be part of the foundation.
Other heavily invested, but separately maintained technologies will join the foundations as 'collaboration partners'. The initial collaborators are ZWave JS, Zigbee2MQTT, Rhasspy and WLED.
The foundation is prohibited by (Swiss) law from participating in commercial operations. Therefore Nabu Casa will continue as the 'for-profit' arm as a commercial partner providing Home Assistant cloud and hardware options like Home Assistant Green, Yellow and SkyConnect.
But wait... there's more!
During this live stream, and for the first time, the core principles and an actual roadmap were shared! The three core principals are Privacy, Choice and Sustainability. I won't go into full details for these. See the brand new Open Home Foundation website for a lot of additional information on the foundation, its goals, structure and principles.
In addition, towards the end of the livestream, an entire section was dedicated to both the short and longer term roadmap for Home Assistant. Again, you can watch the livestream for details, but having a shared roadmap was a first... and much welcomed.
Frequency of Updates, Patches and Breaking Changes
This is one other area I discussed and while it is not really about the 'future' of Home Assistant, it was a pain point I discussed so I thought it only fair to provide an update in this area.
Then:
Home Assistant has a new release every month. I had grumbled about how often a release would be followed by numerous patches to fix issues... sometimes up to 10 in a single month and occasionally even two in a single day. I generally wouldn't even consider upgrading until at least the .3 patch was released... and that generally happened within a few days to a week of the initial release. It appeared that we were all beta testers with our home automation systems... whether we wanted to be or not! I theorized that maybe monthly releases were too quick and didn't allow adequate time for full testing before considering a release as "production ready".
Then there was the list of monthly 'breaking changes' that had to be read to determine if something in your installation was going to break as part of the upgrade. And of course if you skipped releases, these would pile up so that when you did upgrade for some new features, you might have to sort back through multiple lists to find out which release broke something. To Home Assistant's credit, major breaking changes were usually give a depreciate period of six months before being removed. But if you missed the notice in that release's breaking changes, you might not find out until it was actually removed and broke your system.
Now:
Home Assistant still has new releases monthly. But for the past year or so, it seems like the number and frequency of patches have significantly been reduced. On average, it seems that each release might have 3 or 4 patches spread out over the following month. There are a few releases that might have a few more, but it doesn't seem like we get three or four patches in the first few days... much like it was in the past. I'm not sure if it is better review and quality control of PRs, more beta testing or what... but I generally now feel comfortable upgrading after the .1 patch or in about a week after release.
The breaking changes are still there as well... although amusingly 're-marketed' as Backward Incompatible Changes (but they are still breaking changes just like before). But for those larger, depreciated changes, there is now a very welcomed Repairs and notifications in the Home Assistant front end:
If you missed something in the breaking changes (oops sorry.... "backward incompatible changes") that will impact your Home Assistant install on a future upgrade, you will receive a notification and they will be listed under Repairs. Yes, you still have to deal with the changes, but at least you now get notification and a pretty long runway to deal with it in case you missed the original notification in the release notes.... or if you are someone who doesn't read the release notes!
Final Thoughts
This year's State of the Open Home was not only the most professionally produced livestream the folks at Nabu Casa/Home Assistant have done, it was loaded with very welcomed information regarding the long term viability and direction of Home Assistant. Something many of us had been asking about for years. And note that there was a lot of other great information in the livestream that I didn't talk about in this article. There was a panel on open standards, including Zigbee, Z-Wave and matter, update on Home Assistant and more. It is well worth a watch. Yeah, it is almost three hours long... but there are chapter links available to skip to certain topics. I'll leave a link to the livestream and additional information below.
But overall, I am thrilled that almost all my concerns from that original video have been addressed. Yeah... there is still some debate that could be had about the release schedule and breaking changes, but improvements have been made in that area (at least in my opinion... now they need to do the same with ESPHome, which has become the new release, then patch, patch, patch king!).
And it still possible that little by little, we'll continue to lose some of the power of custom YAML integrations and automations, but that will likely be a long way down the road, if ever.
Overall, I am now extremely positive on both the long term viability and success of Home Assistant and am no longer concerned that I might need to be looking for a different smart home platform.
Congratulations to Paulus, Naba Casa, all the contributors and developers... and to the new Open Home Foundation for bringing Home Assistant to where it is today... by far the best smart home automation system for privacy, choice and sustainability!
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