@GuySie Have you at Nabu Casa given any input and ideas to Aqara specifically in regards to them also supporting the Home Assistant’s built-in native Zigbee gateway integration (i.e. ZHA integration)?
Have you gotten any feedback from Aqara that they are also interested in certifying any of their Zigbee devices to allow them to use the “Works via Zigbee with Home Assistant” badge for marketing?
Noted that their announcement does not actually specifically mention the ZHA integration, but instead only focusing on ther support for Matter, however it does indirectly mention Zigbee devices but only in reference to them being used via their Matter Bridge, so not any interest in HA’s ZHA integration?
Even though the current “Works with Home Assistant” partnership rules state that manufacturers are exempt from the duty of supporting and maintaining Home Assistant’s built-in native Zigbee gateway integration (i.e. the ZHA integration) I would imagine that it should be in Aqara’s best interest to make their all their newer Zigbee devices work out-of-the-box via the ZHA integration with full feature-parity compared to when the same Zigbee device is used via their own proprietary Zigbee gateways (e.g. their official Aqara Hub series).
That it, it would be great if Aqara begins to actively contribute to at least custom ZHA Device Handlers (also known as zha-quirks) for Aqara’s Zigbee devices to tweak each device customization to make it the best possible user expeience for all users of the g Home Assistant’s built-in native ZHA integration:
Even more awesome if they would also start to provide Zigbee OTA (Over-The-Air) firmware image and/or OTAU provider(s) for ZHA:
Aqara already offers a huge collection of native Zigbee devices that all more or less work with the ZHA integration, but support in ZHA for each of Aqara’s Zigbee devices could always be improved and optimized , so so it would be very cool if could be said that Aqara officially supported ZHA.
As I understand it, the general idea with the “Works with Home Assistant” program is that if a manufacturer partnering with the Open Home Foundation also wants to use the “Works via Zigbee with Home Assistant” badge in the future for marketing devices then they are directly responsible to somehow maintaining the integrity of how their own devices work with the ZHA integration?
Noting that the “Works with Home Assistant” program’s guidelines specification were recently changed from getting an approval per brand to require that each and every device needs to be certified by Nabu Casa separately if the manufacturer wants to use the “Works via Zigbee with Home Assistant” badge to market that device:
As such I would expect that even if Aqara in interesting in supporting the ZHA integration and decide to to use those “Works via Zigbee with Home Assistant” badges then we can probably expect them to only focus on newest and/or upcoming devices that they still manufacture and sell for them to get return on their investments (at least if their marketing team have anything to say about it):