Could Home Assistant be headed for trouble?

today is not going to be one of my normal how-to videos instead I want to talk about my concerns over the long-term viability of Home assistant and whether it just might be headed for obscurity [Music] welcome to resin chem Tech now before I start and you start firing up your comments let me first say that I love home assistant I've been a home assistant user for almost exactly four years now starting out with version 0.82 I believe this is when the lovely stash boards were still in beta there was no home assistant automation UI so it's come a long way and I've got great appreciation for the developers at Nava Casa and the community for making home assistant what it is today it hardly looks the same so I'm not here to bash on home assistant it's actually my love of Home assistant that has me concerned today I want to talk about some of the strengths of home assistance and what's happening in the current smart home and automation market and maybe a weakness or two of Home assistant as well and what this might lead to down the road now I'm sure what I'm about to say is going to generate a lot of comments and a lot of other opinions and that's fine leave your thoughts down in the comments I would ask though that you watch this video all the way through because what I'm going to talk about does come with a lot of assumptions and a lot of caveats and of course please just keep your comments on topic and respect a little one another now one of the major advantages of Home assistant over its current mainstream Rivals is that it allows you to bring hundreds if not thousands of different devices from different manufacturers under one umbrella and in most cases it allows you to control those locally on your own network without Reliance on the Internet or a vendor's cloud service as of the recording of this video home assistant currentlist 2242 different Integrations available now not all of those are local some of them do rely on a cloud service but the majority of them are local this means that they're your devices under your control but if you follow the Smart Home Market at all you've probably heard of something called matter it just released its first official specification certification program and matter is an alliance of over 400 different companies pretty much anybody who has anything to do with smart home or smart home technology is involved here it includes companies like Amazon Apple Google Samsung tuya espressive and yes even our own Nava Casa team from home assistant is involved in this Alliance the goal here is to come up with a common standard that allows devices from all these different manufacturers to communicate and communicate locally on your network without the need for a cloud and without the need for proprietary hubs or systems so the idea is that much like home assistant today you can pretty much buy any device from any manufacturer and have it work on your current platform whether that platform happens to be Google or Amazon or SmartThings or home assistant now standardizations and alliances like this have been attempted in the past and really haven't gone anywhere matter does seem to have some legs but what we don't know is what it's really going to look like once it's rolled out and been around for a while manufacturers allow basic Communications with their devices but still lock things like Advanced features behind a cloud service or behind a subscription we really don't know but maybe in an Ideal World if we look one two or even five years down the road we might actually have a system where all these devices will operate locally on our Network regardless of manufacture and we'll all talk and play nice together regardless of what automation platform you're using does that sound familiar sure it does us home assistant users have been doing that exact same thing for years now but there may come a time where you'll be able to do the same thing you do with home assistant today pretty much with any platform that's out there this brings me to another key feature of Home assistant and that is its robust automation engine with home assistant automations nearly anything can be a trigger and I'm not talking about just your devices and whether those devices are offer on or opened or closed I've known about things like numeric values in addition you can use events or things like the elevation of the sun above the horizon or an mqtt message or even home assistant automations themselves can be a trigger to run yet another automation adding to the list of triggers is a very robust set of conditions that you can apply to your automation that means that if a door opens you can also check a set of conditions is the light level a certain value is the Sun up or down and other things that you can apply and you can combine multiple conditions using ands and ores to your automation as well finally add on all the different available actions you can have for your automation but you can string together multiple actions within a single Automation and those can get very complex as well home assistant probably has the most robust and complete automation engine on the market except for maybe node-red and a lot of people use node-red in combination with home assistant now for quite some time Amazon has allowed you to use any device that's integrated as a trigger and now it looks like Google is also going down that path any device that is integrated into your Google home or your Amazon ecosystem can be used as a trigger so let's take a quick look at how that works in Google with these new changes when I go in to create a new automation or what they call routines I have to select a starter which is the same thing as a trigger in home assistant but now I have this new Option down here that when a device does something so if I select that I now see all my devices that are available to Google home and in my case since I use home assistant to expose a lot of my devices to Google home I really have nearly all of my devices available through here let's just use my garage lights so I select that well my only really option is when the light turns on or turns off that's my only action option with this particular device I do have a few limited conditions that I can set nowhere near as the complexity of what I can do in home assistant but honestly that for any time and we'll add that for our trigger and our condition now when I go to add an action again I only have available what Google makes available to me I can't adjust other devices based on this and a handful of other options I do have this option for try adding your own but really all that is is whatever spoken phrase you would normally be able to say to your home device if you say Google do this or do that and Google responds you can use that as a custom action now the only reason I had all those devices available to me in Google was because I use home assistant to expose those devices but if matter plays out that means all those devices could likely be available in Google or Amazon packed as triggers without the need for home assistant but you're still somewhat Limited in terms of the Triggers on those devices and the particular actions you can take based on a drop down list that Amazon makes available so it's still not as powerful as home assistant but then I saw this now this is courtesy of nine to five Google but apparently Google is beta testing a script editor for Google home if you look at that closely you'll notice that yep that's yaml so it's yaml with auto completion options to be able to create your automations in Google home now there's no guarantee that this will ever come out of beta and Google is Infamous for coming out with products or starting with beta products and then just silently killing them and they never see the light of day but if this does come to light and again we don't know how powerful the script engine might be and the fact that if matter plays out according to plan then you once again have a situation where you have all of your entities available to be able to create complex automations this time within Google home instead of using home assistant I can hear you already click clacking away in the comments talking about yes but Google is cloud-based and Google is going to harvest all of your data and those of us that use home assistant use it because it's local and we keep all of our data here I don't disagree with you but to be honest does the average consumer really care do they really even understand most of them already have Google or Amazon devices in their homes and if they have Smart devices it's almost guaranteed all those devices are already cloud-based which brings me to my last concern about home assistant let's be completely honest the installation setup and more importantly the ongoing maintenance of Home assistant does take some level of technical skill or at least the ability to do research understand those technical terms and apply them to your home assistant instance every month home assistant comes out with a new release now I'm thrilled at the rapid pace of development but often these new releases come with a longer list of braking changes than they do new features and maybe because the release schedule is so rapid it appears that there might not be time to fully beta test each new version because there are often anywhere from six to eight or even 10 point releases or patches that come out after each monthly release sometimes as many as three four or five in the first week alone and you dare not fall too far behind by skipping a number of new versions because let's say you go six months and then a new feature comes out in home assistance that you really want to use and you decide to do an upgrade you now have six months of breaking changes in there as well and if something does break now you're trying to sort back through all the different release notes from all the different versions to figure out what might cause your automation or your device to break and how you might fix it and while I don't always agree with his opinion on Smart Home Technology I know a number of you that watch my channel also watch Paul Hibbert and I think he explained the idea about breaking changes in home assistant very well in this clip I literally set up home assistant on my PC For the First Time created a dashboard using the things that it had discovered and then pressed a button to update home assistant now I have this you've got to be kidding me I want update One update to a brand new instance with barely anything done to it and it's managed to break something now personally I don't mind I have the skills and the time available to take care of Home assistant to apply those updates and deal with any breaking changes but I don't think that's going to work with your average consumer can you imagine if Amazon or Google set out monthly updates that require their users to look over release notes to determine if something in their house might break and then to actually fix it if it does break is Uncle Jim or Aunt Edna or neighbor Bob or co-worker Steve really going to spend an hour or two every month to maintain their home automation system or are they just going to be perfectly happy with asking Amazon to turn on a light or having Google make an announcement when their garage door opens now home assistant has made significant strides in this area not only the addition of the UI automation editor but they're continuously taking Integrations that previously had to be configured manually in yaml and moving those into Baseline Integrations that are part of the core of Home assistant now while this means it's less likely you're going to have breaking changes it does come with a trade-off in my case a lot of times the yaml Integrations I'm able to customize and configure to exactly my needs when it goes into a baseline integration which is not optional by the way when this happens I cannot no longer keep my yaml integration I'm dependent upon whatever the developers decide to make available and how they opt to make it available I can no longer maintain my own integration and there it I believe lies the rub for home assistant every time they bring something into a baseline integration or add a new point-and-click feature to try to make it easier for beginners it always ends up being a one size fits all and they take yet another little piece away from the more advanced users who really want the ability to customize their system and while it's been stated in the past by the developers that yaml is never going to go away it does feel like each new release of Home assistant takes another little piece of yaml away in favor of a generic integration or feature targeted towards those beginning users they continue down this path how long will it be before home assistant looks a lot like Google and Amazon and the fact that you can only customize it based on the features or options that the developers decide works for everyone so all this begs the question of what should home assistant be or what should it be trying to become with all the current changes in the Smart Home Market if matter actually comes to pass like we hope it does all of your devices will be able to communicate locally with each other on your network and if Google actually does release something like that advanced script editor where does that leave home assistant should home assistant try to become a general consumer product and compete directly with Amazon and Google as a system that Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty can put in their home or should they refocus their efforts on kind of the core group of users that got them where they are today those of us with an emphasis on security privacy and local control that have the technical skills to maintain it but also want the flexibility to be able to customize and use the system for our exact needs for our particular Smart Home I don't want this to seem like I'm predicting the eventual Doom of Home assistant I love home assistant and I really want to see it to continue to thrive and succeed but with the current changes in the market I think that home assistant is going to need to decide where it belongs in the market and put its efforts towards making it the best system that possibly can for that market let me know your thoughts down in the comments what do you think home assistant should be and what should be their target market for the future and while I'm almost afraid to even ask on this particular video if you found anything that you liked do me a favor and hit that like button if you want to see more of my videos which normally about projects and using Smart Home Technology and not opinion of pieces hit that subscribe button and if you want to be notified when I release a new video ding that little bell icon as always I'd like to say thank you for watching and I hope to see you soon [Music] wait

Channel: ResinChem Tech

Views: 39,897

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Id: pZWlRvA1eq0

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 05 2022