Okay, this is probably a very meaningless post, but I just have to say it…
I was one of the original adopters of SmartThings. I backed their Kickstarter campaign and I had a lot of fun with the original platform. I knew enough coding to make my own applets or modify others. I played around with a lot of things and really had fun with it. Then it all changed… the cloud platform started becoming unreliable. The process to write your own automations got more complex (for me at least). The mobile app became flaky and didn’t respond half the time while triggers only worked when they wanted to. Home Automation went from a fun extra to a chore trying to troubleshoot everything to the point where I just gave up on the vast majority of it.
On the recommendation of someone else I got an Hubitat a while back… it was more reliable than SmartThings, though still had it’s issues. Automation seemed really complex and annoying. The app was super limited too. It was a lateral move at best… trading some advantages for other disadvantages.
Then HomeAssistant came along… well, I mean it’s been here a long time, but came along for me! Now, I’ve only been on the platform for about a month, but so far it’s just feels so good… it feels like what SmartThings was for me originally. Triggers work! The automation is powerful, yet relatively easy. I can get into the code if I want to really tweak and customize. The mobile app is full featured. Everything just works… well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it mostly just works.
Like I said, this is kind of a pointless post… but it really hit me yesterday as I was adding in yet another automation that I used to use back in the day but had abandoned due to unreliability. It’s just fun to use Home Automation again.
