With Home Assistant, we integrate with over 1000 different APIs. The majority of these integrations are created and maintained by the Home Assistant community. Over the years a number of companies have stepped up to work with our community offering samples and engineering support. In a few cases, we saw companies pick up the maintenance of integrating their products in Home Assistant.
Sadly, a couple of times it happened that companies went silent after their initial contribution, causing users to be wondering why new devices are not being supported. We want to protect our users from investing in products for their homes that wonât work well with Home Assistant.
Today weâre introducing the Works with Home Assistant program to allow manufacturers to show their support and commitment to Home Assistant and its community.
The program requires manufacturers to maintain the integration of their products in Home Assistant, offer a good user experience, provide product samples and give us an engineering contact to escalate issues. In return, manufacturers will be able to use the âWorks with Home Assistantâ badge on their products and documentation. The terms of the Works with Home Assistant program are enforced in an agreement signed by both Nabu Casa and the manufacturer.
With Home Assistant we are always working on educating our users about preferring local control and open standards when acquiring new products. This is also reflected in the âWorks with Home Assistantâ badges.
There are manufacturers that are creating products that integrate into Home Assistant using standards like Z-Wave, Zigbee, or Matter (soon). In these cases, the integration is maintained by the Home Assistant community and Nabu Casa. These companies can still become a member of the Works with Home Assistant program but are relieved from integration maintenance.
Products that are approved for the Made with ESPHome program will be eligible to use the âWorks locally with Home Assistantâ badge as part of their Made with ESPHome membership.
I like the idea, but the name makes me cringe and actually scares me a little. I was all in with the âWorks with Nestâ program then it was bought by GoogleâŠandâŠin comparison they made Titanic look like a success.
Marketing teams hate giving up space on the box to log large wordy things.
Would probably be a good idea to make small versions maybe with a large HA logo then a small logo / icon chain showing the via as some devices might work more than one way?
IE a big HA symbol followed by a small Zwave logo or Big HA followed by a cloud symbol. Local could be represented by a wifi or Ethernet jack symbol?
Just a thought.
Also I find the long text for the âhowâ wordy and slow to read. Would love to scan the box for the symbols.
*** UPDATE ***
next up letting companies pay to being able to use the badge and after that make the nabu casa cloud required to use home assistant! and then maybe make the subscription a little more expensive⊠and when all people leave the project just sell it to amazon or goole.
Heck who cares about the future of Home Assistant anymore. this could well be the beginning of the end.
We all know what happened with IFTTT and their money asking if companies want their products to support it.
Nabu casa did a smart job first making a big community with people building the system for them. Now they can make big bucks of it by selling the name badge to companies. Thank you all devs! time well spend!
Or maybe they use all that money to hire people so that people that complain if their issue or PR is not looked at within 24 hours gets more attention. In my eyes the only reason why HA works is that a lot of people support Nabu so they can hire people to work on the fast amount of open items. If people would only put in their free time it would never have taken off the way it has now. Even if Nabu is mandatory (which it is not) home assistant is open source. It is not owned by Nabu.
Thereâs literally no parallels between IFTTT and HomeAssistant other than it is automation for products. One only worked in the cloud on hardware the company owned, another runs on local hardware and can run without any internet connection at all.
Itâs also funny you say that when the blog points out an obvious issue that some companies have used HomeAssistant to sell products and did not follow through, kind of the opposite of what youâre insinuating
It would be nice if this works many times have requested help on sites that work with HA and most responses are âI got it workingâ and that would be all. Or Go to ESPhome.io there you will find the functional answer to your question, but not. Sure for those that know all about the in and outs the answer is obvious to them.
The other thing that drives me away from HA is the lack of devices known to work with HA. Just ask that question in groups and they say âwhat are you talking about all these products work with HAâ. But NOT. How am I supposed to know the sensor or lamp or switch suggested by these well-meaners requires a USB dongle or hub?
This is just not ready for prime time sure for those that live the life in geekdom sure but not for those that want to set it up and use it without having to figure out why it stopped working after the last update.
I really like HA and ESPhome but as I stated it is not yet ready for the mass market and maybe that was by design. Looking forward to purchasing some WORKS products and testing one last time.
âWorks with Matterâ, âWorks with ZigBeeâ, âWorks with ZWaveâ should hopefully make that more clear for users that wouldnât know what to look for
Wouldnât it be better to have a page where the user can enter the name of a product and look up the support in HA?
I really like the zigbee2mqtt devices page.
For me itâs not always that clear which integration in HA matches with a product and what I can expect in terms of usability (e.g. exposed entities/attributes).
I think the documentation of HA can help filling this gap, but it will require quite some work.
Iâm afraid youâre right. Nabu casa is creating more and more devices, like the home assistant blue and yellow. They are also going to make a matter stick. Making the subscription more expensive. I fear in the future youâll have to pay more and more âŠ
But, if I look at the problems I have with the upgrade to python 3.10⊠and 2022.7 they still have a long way to go. So may bugs⊠this is not testedâŠ
Yes! Iâve been wanting (something like) this for a while.
This will make it easier to find compatible devices and be certain whether something is a local device.
I see something on offer at Amazon (usually an IP camera) - and my first thing to do is to Google the model of the camera followed by âHome Assistantâ - which generally does bring me to this community, but sometimes takes me to blog posts. Itâs a common pattern for me to quickly find out if a camera works with Home Assistant.
If HA were willing to keep a public record of products that have this certification (including which tier) then that would make the search for automation devices so much easierâŠ
I have done this with fully open source software where the buyout risk is little to none. In this case there is risk on both sides if there is a change to how the program works. A properly structured program should not be affected by an ownership change on either side. Obvs a perfect world take.
Hopefully not, but by giving device manufacturers an incentive to appeal to a greater market (especially if they provide local access which is obviously the ultimate attraction to us) it should make our product options much better.
