I’m very new to Home Assistant and currently in the process of deciding which platform to use for a new smart house project.
My main criteria is being as open in regards to integration of third-party systems as possible, so really everything can be controlled from one central system. Home Assistant seems to be a very active developed system with a great community and a quick test installation went without major issues.
Therefore, I’m trying to find out now which third-party integrations Home Assistant offers and first got a bit disappointed as I did not even find an integration with Miele household devices in the official integration list:
As I couldn’t believe a brand like Miele is not supported, I googled a bit further and found “HACS” where Miele is indeed listed as integration:
So now I’m confused, why something like “HACS” is needed when there are direct integrations with Home Assistant? Is e. g. the integration with Miele not good enough to be fully supported by Home Assistant or what is the reason this is not listed in the official Home Assistant integration list?
This is really confusing for possible new users like myself.
Maybe someone could shed some light on the idea behind that.
Because, as you have found out, not all integrations are a part of the HA core. So users can create a custom integration and make it available without the need to get it accepted into the core integrations.
Only integrations that are part of the HA core are listed in the docs. Third party (outside of the HA core development) integrations aren’t listed there. Likely because 1- HA doesn’t want to give the impression that they are officially supported integrations when they aren’t (all third party integrations are supported by their respective authors) and 2 - there is no way HA could know about every third-party supplied custom integration to be able to list them all.
Usually the reason is that the author of the custom integration hasn’t gone thru the (somewhat daunting) steps to get the integration accepted into the core.
Or it could be that they don’t want it to be part of core because it gives them better control over their integrations and they aren’t tied to the HA update/release cycle.
Or it could be that no one in the HA dev team wants to take responsibility for maintaining the integration once it gets implemented in the core. Like I said all core integrations need to have a member of the dev team as a maintainer. If no one wants to it won’t get included.
After looking at the custom integration, it seems like they could easly add this to core. So, it’s definitely one of the reasons you listed as it doesn’t rely on a separate library.
first thanks a lot for both of your quick replies which is much appreciated!
It’s totally clear that Home Assistant cannot know about and include every integration somebody created “somewhere”, but what confused me and actually still feels pretty strange to me is that there seems to be with HACS a complete separate “eco system” including update management for integrations.
I’m purely speaking as a new user trying to choose “the best” smart home system and thus comparing available integrations. There it is really a pity if important integrations (like one of the biggest German high-end household device manufacturer Miele) are not supported according to the official Home Assistant website (where it is e. g. on OpenHab).
well, I didn’t say that I would want to use OpenHab (already because it’s Java and I dislike Java ), but just mentioning that based on the official websites of OpenHab and Home Assistant it seems OpenHab does provide “out-of-the-box” support for Miele devices and Home Assistant doesn’t.
And that is, purely speaking from the end-user perspective searching for a solution, a pity if there is actually a (looking at some posts in the forum) pretty good solution available which is not distributed (and thus not listed) via the official Home Assistant solution, but rather in a separate store like system called HACS.
So it just felt to me that Home Assistant is selling itself short here.
Anyway, I got it now that you always need to search for integrations both in the official integration list as well as in the HACS list.
Best regards and thanks again for all the replies here
Andreas
I’m curious how you came to this information/conclusion, because your statement is incorrect. People who add an integration are code owners of the integration and a maintainer or member of the Home Assistant organization, reviews your code, approves when the code is good and merge it.
You can read more information about code owners in ADR-0008:
), but just mentioning that based on the official websites of OpenHab and Home Assistant it seems OpenHab does provide “out-of-the-box” support for Miele devices and Home Assistant doesn’t.