Hi Everyone.
I’m very new to HA and I have installed HAOS on a RPi3.
I have Philips Hue hub with 12 units added to it. Those are added to HomeKit directly from the Philips Hue app. I have tried to find the answers from other posts, but those posts just ended dead. My question is:
What is the benefit to have Homekit being integrated through HA vs directly from the Philips Hue app or is the best practice just to have Homekit integrated from HA?
It depends on how you plan on using your system and what’s the primary source of truth.
But in most cases here on a HA forum you will find HA is the center of the logic behind everything in a setup. It drives the automation, therefore you want it to have the fastest and least complicated connection possible to the devices and services it manages. if that’s how you will run you will want everything to connect to HA with as few ‘hops’ as possible to reduce latency.
If you’re just using it to provide connectivity to alternate platforms and intend to continue to use your home kit interface as primary. You might go the other way. Each setup has its pros and cons. But at least in mine - I center the system on one platform and try to get everything to direct connect there as much as possible. For me that’s HA.