I helped JJ by video call for a few hours today and many of their integrations are now working in HA 
If I put on my UI/ UX or tech support hat for a moment, I think it was very valuable to see what a new user experience is like today, compared to what it was like several years ago when I was getting started with HA. Very smooth and polished and didn’t have to touch a single line of YAML or the configuration.yaml file to get a whole bunch of integrations going. Woohoo!
However, there were still some misconceptions that I hope to post about here for either new users in a similar spot, and/ or the HA team to use as feedback.
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User’s expectation that buying a HA Green device would “just work”, going as far as plug it in and all your smart devices would magically show up ready to go.
Hard to blame them, when that’s literally what Step 3 of the marketing shows on the product page: Home Assistant Green - Home Assistant
I think it’s more accurate to say that purchasing a HA Green or other official device saves you the trouble of getting your own Raspberry Pi and installing HA on that, or perhaps digging out a old 10 year old computer of yours and installing HA on that, and you’re supporting the development of HA with your purchase! So this is important. HA Green gets you a plug and play experience that gets you to the point of “HA is running and you can log in to the web interface”. After that point, it’s the same setup experience for your smart devices regardless of which way you have installed HA or what hardware you are running it on. -
So, at this point, some devices may start showing up automatically, but many smart home integrations are through the cloud, and so require you to know what they are, so that you can go to Settings → Devices & services → Add Integration and go through the list of brands to “sign in with the app” credentials and then HA will find and bring in those devices.
SmartThings and Kasa are both native integrations in HA, but that also requires the user to know that Kasa is the name of a line under the TP-Link brand, so they need to selectTP-Linkand thenTP-Link Smart Hometo be able to add Kasa devices.
Sidenote: creating the detailed list of devices and brands was extremely useful in order to search for everything and figure out what still needed to be connected.
At this point, I’m going to continue with talking about the “priority list” of how to get more of your devices into HA, aimed at new users that haven’t been around the block long enough to “know what’s what” intuitively yet. You should absolutely use Google and search for how other people solved the problem, but keep these priorities in mind: -
When you can’t find what you need in HA Native integrations, turn to HACS. In this case, the native Govee integrations did not support the H6008 lights, but the Govee integration in HACS does!
I found it helpful to describe HACS as a community 'App Store" for HA, so you use HACS to download the integration, but then you still need to (restart HA if needed, and then) go to Settings → Devices & services → Add Integration in order to actually “open and sign in to the app” like you did before with a native integration. -
Sometimes, an integration does exist <elsewhere on the internet> but is not already in the HACS catalog. In this case, a search revealed this forum topic: Pura | The World's Best Smart Home Fragrance Provider? which was a good indicator that the developer was being supportive of the work, several other people may have tried it out, and here’s a GitHub link with clear instructions on how to add it to HACS!
Remember to always work all the steps backwards. In this case, add the repo to HACS. Then use HACS to download it. Then, you still need to go to Settings → Devices & services → Add Integration in order to “sign in” and set everything up. Remember this sequence. Be careful with downloading random things off the internet. While it’s not a guarantee of safety or successful performance, the HA topics with recent developer responses showing they care was a green flag. -
Knowing what is really Tuya under the hood. Most consumers don’t know that very few companies make a lot of stuff that 500 other companies then white label under their own brand. I can buy a Midea branded chest freezer a Costco, but very many other brands of refrigerators, freezers, and HVAC appliances might also be Midea under the hood. In a similar vein, Tuya is the backend for a vast amount of IOT devices including smart switches and plugs, lights, robot vaccums, and mini splits. You’ll develop your own spidey sense for it after a while, but a good way to think about it is: “This smart switch on Amazon is from a brand I’ve never heard of. If I’m lucky, it’s Tuya under the hood!” These brands all want to lock you into their own app, and so they won’t advertise that they’re using Tuya under the hood, so you can search the Amazon reviews for “Tuya” or “Smart Life” to see if someone has commented. Which brings us to the next point… you want to use the Smart Life app instead of the brand-specific one. Know that compatibility with Smart Life means Tuya.
So, in this specific case, 4 smart plugs were already in the Smart Life app. We used the native Tuya integration in HA and they showed up.
We identified that GoSund was one of those brands that’s really Tuya under the hood, removed the switches and fans from that app, and they auto-showed up in Smart Life . Reload Tuya in HA and the new devices show up!
I found one forum topic suggesting that PetSnowy litter box might also be running Tuya. It was a bit of a long shot but sure enough, it showed up in Smart Life, the UI is absolutely identical to the brand app, and it even remembered all the pet history. This one is showing as unsupported in HA native Tuya integration though, so I’m still working on some solutions for that, but one fewer app is a success! -
Musings on Alexa. There’s a few fundamental points to address:
a) In my opinion, it’s ok and even valuable to have Alexa and Home Assistant co-exist, and mostly peacefully, even! Think of the two as a venn diagram, with (hopefully) a large overlap, but there’s certain things that only one can do, or that one does a heck of a lot better. For example, I’ve accepted whatever loss of privacy comes with having Alexa in my household and an Echo Dot in every room. It’s very valuable to me to walk into a room and say “Alexa, lights on” or already be in bed on a cold day and say “Alexa, turn all the lights off”.
I’ve already spent the money on the Echo Dots, but even if I was faced with the choice again today, I cannot build my own voice assistant hardware for the $20 or less per unit (gen3, and maybe $30 or less for a gen4) that I bought my Echo Dots for during the winter holidays in prior years.
My smart locks are not compatible with HA, but are in Alexa.
The hunches are valuable: “I think you’ve left home, would you like to lock this door?” and “I think you’re asleep, so I’ve turned the lights off”.
On the flip side, HA is amazing for wall panels (and buying cheap tablets costs a fraction of what an Echo Hub would cost), data logging, hacking on and true customizability, owning your own data, talking to truly almost anything, and I absolutely love making my own sensors and devices with ESPHome.
As I said, they can both coexist peacefully.
b) Understand that you need to add the actual brand integration to HA. “My Wyze, Switchbot, Govee, Pura, GoSund, Smart Life, and Kasa all show up in my Alexa app” does not mean that you just add Alexa integration to HA and everything will show up in HA. Those are Alexa integrations or skills that allow you to see those things in the app, but you still have to go through the individual integrations in HA as I described above.
Note that there is a grey area here for specific devices that don’t talk over Wifi or a hub. Some smart bulbs specifically require an Echo device nearby to act as its relay/ proxy to get into the Alexa app.
c) If you do have Alexa hardware such as Echo Dots, and you want to have those show up in HA, then you want the Alexa integration. We found the HA native Alexa integration to not do much. You want Alexa Media Player from HACS. It does a lot more. It may handle the grey area described above for you, I shall play with my Sengled smart bulbs that were freebies with the Echo Dots soon.
I truly hope that the above lengthy writeup does help others. I shall leave with a few scattered thoughts:
- Take things one step at a time. Don’t change 500 things all at once. Split your insurmountable hundreds of smart devices spread across 30+ apps into small bite sized pieces. Tackle one of them at a time, then take a break and enjoy the victory before moving on to the next.
- Know what problems you are solving, so that you can solve that actual problem and not some underlying technical stepping stone (see: XY Problem).
- Understand wireless protocol basics just a little bit so you know what to expect. In my opinon: Wifi/ wired network is the holy grail, because that means HA can talk to your device over the network, directly. Bluetooth is close range, it’s like you have to be almost in the same room as the device to be able to talk to it. So you need an adapter, and that introduces complexity. If the device needs a hub, consider whether you need to get that Hub or if some other kind of adapter can do the job. Zigbee/ Zwave are all radio protocols that can go longer distances than Bluetooth (the range of your house if you’re lucky) so you would need a Zigbee/ Zwave to USB adapter if you have such devices and want to talk to them in HA. Know what problem you are solving before throwing noodles at the wall to see what sticks.
- Please please please back up your HA setup and confiiguration. I’m a big fan of the Google Drive backup plugin. I use it with an extra Gmail account of mine, not my daily driver account.