that’s not really saying much when home assistant is literally one of the most active projects on GitHub Octoverse: The state of open source and rise of AI in 2023 - The GitHub Blog
I have been trying to follow logs but they seem to be nonexistent once it fails at the google cast. I find it odd that radio-browser integration works fine in a browser and other integrations (DNLA server) work with google cast. it seems the combination of radio-browser and google cast dont play nice together now. Also strange is I have a full back up of 2024.6.4 and if I roll back to it I am having the same error. I have an image of the sd card before the upgrade and restore (2025.6.4) and it still works. I will lose my device history if I just swap cards with the backup and wait for the next upgrade to try again, so I am still trying to find something that will provide a solution or clues to what is actually broke. at least I can still collect my weather station data and energy data while I wait for a fix to my streaming audio. 
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I’ve commented before that I think the pace of development is too fast. I’d be ok with fewer new features and more emphasis on stability and new hardware and integrations.
I usually wait until late in the month to try the update, and I always do a full VM backup before I install it. This month I tried upgrading earlier and had problems, so I reverted to the backup. Upgrades are always scary and I don’t like that.
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Please give a source for this.
Notice that @crzynik sourced their statement. It only makes sense!
Ummm, yeah. Do that with every release/upgrade to any software! Great tip for everyone.
Define ‘n’ please.
Nope.
I know I have not been here as long as many others. But, for my HA tenur, I have taken EVERY update the day it came out. I believe I have only had an issue ONE time.
But, that is some great advice above. Thanks for your input on how to correctly investigate updates before upgrading.
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I do the beta, and update at the first opportunity, after looking at breaking changes. Never had a problem.
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Same here! 
My installations are updated to the lastest, but the first install of that system was my third install of HA-OS. One on my old Pi that ran for around two years, and two on my new homeserver. This one is now running for four years something. That move was done via a normal backup and it was all good.
For most people HA runs just fine. People do update in a matter of days after new versions come out, see the statistics.
I’m starting to get the feeling, that the problem might not be HA, but rather between screen and chair… 
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Is this now again “all against someone [here jeffcrom]” who allowed himself to say something negative?
I didn’t have that many problems in the past, but everyone should at least see, that there are more and more really severe problems in the last releases and months.
Easy to say “your problem”, “custom here and there”, but if so many custom integrations work before (and until the HA core upgrade) and perhaps rely on stable (?) functions and apis, I don’t know if the frequency of breaking changing basics, functions and apis are really the best idea of all, if other integration then break and break HA then as well. Example the changes and problems with the entity history this release.
I have the feeling that HA grew up with the custom cards and integration. And now it breaks more and more with this concept (to get rid of all this?) and don’t care about them any more. And this is not because of “open source” because these changes are only allowed and well approved only from the inner circle of the project.
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Criticizing HA seems to be considered as “bad manners” due to some efforts.
Contributing to the project is not only “saying only positive things”.
I understand that HA core/frontend cannot be / should not be “frozen”, they are supposed to change, it is inevitable; and custom staff should adapt. Ofc “it is always good to do everything in moderation” (if I translated this expression properly…)
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The changes in the home assistant API are to make the core have more stability. One of our most active volunteers is going through the core API and cleaning up all potential areas that can cause instability. Due to this, portions of the API are being deprecated, while other areas are getting warnings to let developers know they used the API incorrectly.
The unfortunate result of these changes is that the custom integrations have to adapt to the changes.
The fortunate result of these changes is a more stable home assistant. No more random crashes, no more dead hangs, no more memory leaks, etc.
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Criticism is not frowned upon here, however there’s a miss conception from a few people who think they can deliver criticism in an unfriendly manner. @nohn and @CaptTom are providing his feedback in a very welcoming manner. Others, who have garnered responses from the moderation team, have not.
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Lets try to keep the flame fest to a minimum. I understand tensions may fly high when discussing Home Assistant, but lets try not to gang up on people. Thank you.
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“unfriendly” is rather exaggerated.
It was not directed at you or anyone else in this thread. It was a general statement.
Oh, general, OK then.
From my humble practice since 1997 (cruise missiles → … → gov IT projects):
- people are discussing some solution
- some opinions are positive, some negative
- nobody considers negative opinions as personal abuse - this is right & cool.
I assume you meant me.
The post I quoted had some statements I didn’t agree with along with some great advice for everyone. I asked for a reference, praised the advice, and gave an opinion based on my experience running HA.
Just thought I’d chime in here because really, like most folks, I only post when I have issues, however besides this latest update screwing over my whole dashboard because the Harmony switches were removed and that I am still spending hours on fixing and trying to make my dashboard work the same, overall HA updates for me work 99% of the time just fine. I am not sure why working code (like the Harmony switches) needs to be removed if it is not causing stability issues and in the harmony case, makes things 1000 times harder for the user but I digress as I said my bit about that earlier in the post…
Anyway, I have been running HA for around 4 years, I have over 50 integrations running (both official and HACS), I have multiple brands of over 200 devices from Lights, switches, fans, energy meters and cameras all the way down to a few M5Stacks which means I have 1650+ entities and as I said a lot of integrations to get it all into HA… I update pretty much every time after a quick read of the release notes and while there may have been a few small issues, I think only 2 or 3 times over 4 years have I had to downgrade versions, and whatever the reason is normally fixed pretty quickly so I update again next release.
I do backup every two days (both local and to the cloud) and that makes things so easy to downgrade or install a backup that I know works in those few rare times something did actually break. I will also add that the one time my SD card failed, I had HA back up and running in under 10 minutes. So, besides this latest update, which is doing my head in trying to repair my dashboards, I think the team does a awesome job at keeping HA running stable, secure, up to date and as a bonus we get awesome new features every month too.
Sure, this won’t be the same for everyone but personally I reckon the team here does a pretty decent job at updates as I said. I look forward to each month to see what cool new features I get, so to go against all the negativity I just read, I reckon you all do a bang up job (except whoever removed harmonys swtches LOL I j/k) so thanks…
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I like the frequent updates to HA. I like that things in HA are fixed to be “right” even if it means breaking other things. I appreciate all the hard work that volunteers put into HA. I take the responsibility that if I elect to upgrade HA I need to deal with the issues. For me, HA is fun. For my family it is a nightmare that I thrust upon them. YMMV.
I said this so people know that there is at least one person like me out there.
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I love this quote! I’m quite sure it’s not just you.
But it also gets to the root of this discussion. How much time, research, learning, skill, knowledge and effort should the “average” user need to invest to keep HA running?
I think HA is going through some “growing pains” as it transitions from a niche for a few hobbyists to a mass-market product. This is inevitable, and it’s a good thing. Unfortunately it means push-back from devs who feel threatened when anyone challenges the way they’ve always done things, and from users who feel things are being done to them without due consideration. These discussions should be taken as a good opportunity to hear “the other side,” not as personal attacks.
For the record, I sing the praises of HA to anyone who will listen. It is truly a great project. I’ll also contribute constructive observations here, based on my experience both as a career IT guy and a plain ole’ user of HA. Sometimes the push-back can seem personal, but I try not to take it that way.
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Preach! I thought I was sufficiently prepared for this change, NOPE, definitely wasn’t. I didn’t have the switches referenced in any of my automations so I thought I was good … well, when the switches effectively act as the bridge between Home Assistant and Google Assistant, turns out they were still doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting!
So, after the 2024.7 update, stuff broke and I needed to make a bunch of input_booleans and a bunch of Node-Red to be able to basically get back to the previous functionality and being able to clearly tell what activity is on; switch between activities and turn off the active activity with the proper thing happening by voice, HA or the physical controller and them all being in sync with what they show you.
With all this said, I haven’t had anything unexpectedly break on me that I recall with HA in a very long time and while I wasn’t expecting this to break now (because I thought I had prepared it already), I knew exactly why it broke when it started happening because HA did warn us about this a long time ago (back in January IIRC).
HA has been extremely stable overall for me and for all the people complaining in this thread about needing LTS branches [paraphrasing], it’s kind of a testament to just how well things had been going that everyone just jumped on a .0 release without a second thought! I remember the days where it was common to tell people not to upgrade until at least the .3 or .4 patch came out! The rare recent times I have had any issues with a .0 or a .1 I just rolled back my backup and waited another week before trying again and it’s always been resolved or at least clear instructions on how to fix. I think a lot of the people using HA really need to get their backups figured out because it should not be anywhere near as big a deal as they’re making it out to be (imo, but I’m just a user with an opinion; same as they are).
I wasn’t even going to complain about the Harmony remotes until I saw other people doing the same and figured I’d use it as an opportunity to vent about my morning wasted 
The ESPHOME change otoh took me a lot of effort to fix up, but that’s because I used it as an opportunity to try and standardize my configs as much as possible and pulled common items out into separate files to make it so I’d only ever need to update ONE or TWO files in the future and then click ‘update all’ instead of needing to manually hit all 50 of them again! If anyone else wants to do the same, I made a post about it, so just check my history … I don’t post much so you should find it pretty quick.
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My two cents over this version and the HA evolution. First I don’t make updates on every single version or even release but try to not stay too behind. I was on 2024.4.4 and move to 2024.7 after reading all the changes of May and June and yes it is probably one of the updates with more issues for me, and don’t feel that won stability however my system has more sensors and integrations than never and now use less cpu and memory resources which confirms the effort that developers are putting on it. I had to open some issues in the core as well on some the custom components and things are starting to be addressed but patience is required since we depend on the kindness of the community. That said my biggest fear is that some custom components might break at any moment and that will stop me to use recent versions because integrations are the value add of HA. Thanks to all that contribute to this community.
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