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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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...
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.
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.
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"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
