Do Athom even care?

When you want to add a new automation, you get this:

No idea when it was introduced, but not (very) recently.

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I switched to Home Assistant recently, my Homey is now ‘degraded’ to manage some Somfy RTS shutters, a Zwave switch and a Kaku switch and expose them via MQTT to Home Assistant.
Main reason was that the load on my Homey (early 2016 model) was more than it can handle due to some apps I really found useful causing flows to randomly fail.
A Homey Pro could be a solution but looking at the costs, Athom’s firmware progressing and the lack of communicating with its users I decided this would be a good moment to start with Home Assistant. The success of Homey is in my opinion by far the effort of the community and all app developers.
It took me some time to get familiar with Home Assistant but now I’m very pleased with it and works flawlessly.

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Oh my.
As one of the “very responsive” community developers I kinda feel slightly insulted :frowning:
I always try to provide best user and support experience for my few apps. But as everywhere else you always have some ungrateful users who rather give you a bad rating out of not knowing what they are talking about and not asking for help either :frowning:

I rarely had any issues with my Homey either. Everything works pretty smooth for me. So, just saying, dissatisfaction is a very individual issue. Just saying. I have no single ZigBee device, maybe that is one massive point that I have almost no issues, who knows :man_shrugging:

On the other hand, I tried Home Assistant and been massively disappointed by it. It supports only a fraction of my devices and/or features in comparison to Homey. And then it is also very maintenance intense. Don’t get me wrong, the learning curve with HA is steep, but I found it too cumbersome to configure it to my liking and rewriting half of the integrations just to fit my needs again was a no no for me. It sure is other peoples cup of tea, not questioning that. You should always go for what works best for you.

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I don’t think anyone is trying to insult the community developers here - in fact, I think the only reason Homey still exists is due to the community developers, most if not all of whom are very supportive and helpful.

Athom is entirely at fault here - they promise one thing yet the reality is very different!

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Man, u gotta love Homey!

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They have more important things to do like making youtube videos on pairing light bulbs with Homey.

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It’s not my intention to insult anyone here! As I wrote, it’s the community and app developers like you that make Homey successful!

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From a consumer standpoint is perfectly reasonable to choose between an open source community platform and a commercial platform. Both have pro’s and cons because of their “business” model.

When you buy commercial, you can demand that:

  1. the device does ad advertised at the time of buying
  2. that they fix bugs to ensure 1
  3. that you can contact support for 1 and 2
  4. that they provide security updates to keep their networked device safe for a reasonable period.

What you cannot expect is that these payed developers give you new functionality for years to come, implement drivers for all your needs and/or give you a new zigbee stack because the one you bought has limitations.

These things you get as a bonus. You cannot take demands or expect that to happen in the same pace that open source volunteers deliver new stuff.

Also it’s near impossible to properly support Homey as it’s a platform where people add extra functionality though apps, and users might do all kinds of weird stuff in their flows that can mess things up. I’m not saying support is good enough, but place yourself in their shoes. Nobody’s paying monthly support fees. Heck, people are complaining that a backup server and storage has a monthly fee. I’m guessing they aren’t getting rich from that.

Worst case, if nobody buys a Homey from now, their monthly income is zero and they can give you sqat. Personnel costs money. Yes there is a margin on the build cost when you buy, but that’s to cover past investments way more than it does future support.

So you cannot compare Athom support to open source or community support.

You also cannot compare Athom to Apple, who charges 1500 for aa phone that may well cost them less than you payed for your Homey pro.
Apple also rips 30% from everything you buy in their app store - they have monthly income from that too.

What have you payed for your additional Homey apps? And how would you feel if Athom took 30% of your donations to community Homey Developers? And how many community developers can claim they get a decent income from the donations, even when Athom isn’t claiming a third?

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Man, u gotta love Apple!

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Don’t think anyone compared them to Apple

Homey is relying on an open source development model in essence and Athom are taking advantage of it

  1. the device does ad advertised at the time of buying

It doesn’t. They removed support for an app.that was advertised and I purchased for with no notice. That’s one that affected me, sure there are others

That’s for sure

“Apple will halve the commission that smaller developers of iOS apps have to pay, the tech giant announced on Wednesday. The commission, also known informally as ‘app store tax’, applies to small purchases in apps.”

Was the app built by Athom, and did the vendor of your device change anything in the API? Maybe they killed the app because the vendor removed the API. For instance, Tado removed home/away features, nothing Atom could do about that.

If its the Hive api I found: “ This API will evolve. Future versions of this API may add new endpoints or parameters. Because the API is still in Beta, parameters and endpoint may be subject to change and support is not guaranteed (although we will try our best to maintain backward compatibility).”.

So the API they built for was not stable in the first place.

Maybe Athom got tired of constant changes.

Asked you before, still didn’t get an honest answer. Why are you still here, just using every opportunity kicking at Athom & Homey if it’s such a bad company selling crap? Compulsive behavior?

Must say it took you a long time to show up this time… Must be my reply that triggered you?

I mention it further up the thread. It was built by Athom was there when I bought the device and now is not. So to your point, my device does not do what it did at the time of buying. I don’t care for the reasons. I’m a consumer buying a product that said it supported something and now does not. By your own admission that’s not cool

(For the record I don’t actually care about Hive, I no longer use it, but it is indicative of the issue)

Home assistant says the following: This integration uses the unofficial API used in the official Hive website [https://my.hivehome.com]. So, maybe the driver you bought no longer worked. Should they adapt to whatever happens to an unofficial API? Not forever. They probably shouldn’t have built against an unofficial API in the first place, but most users then probably appreciated the effort.

They canned it because of too few users apparently. That’s according to official support at the time. No speculation is needed.
There were over 1m households in the UK with it in 2018 apparently. That speaks volumes of Homey market penetration and market plans for the UK

Most implementations on Homey are based on unofficial APIs. Look at the hard work done on Xiaomi (something Athom shout a lot about, but nothing to do with them, all thanks to @TedTolboom I believe) - all based of unofficial apis

In defense of Robert. He is in my opinion not kicking at Athom. Although he doesn’t use Homey anymore(i assume) he is of great help for many on this forum. I don’t agrea of reacting this way @robertklep, and other community members

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I call that ostrich behavior. But hey, everyone may have his own opinion :+1:

Except myself and some other positive members, according to your friend…

Yes, @TedTolboom. Proper saint. You just reminded me I should donate some more to him for his hard work. Will do that right now.