Rethink (reimagine) Add-ons, Integrations AND HACS

After using HA now since 2017, I understand the difference between all of them, but it’s WAY too complicated for the average person. These should all be combined into one area. WTH, I have to install an integration in HACS and then figure out how to add that same integration in settings/devices & integrations? WTH, why? That’s as clear as mud for new users.

Want to add functionality to HA? Add a module IN ONE SPOT. Modules could be add-ons or integrations, either core or community, labeled as such.

Sure some add-ins & integrations are “official” & others aren’t, isn’t that what labels are for?

Gotta start thinking of simplifying, not complicating, this powerful beast, especially if the goal is to attract more users.

This is done for the zwave int fraction and from what I see it causes more issues than it alleviates. We have to spend a ton of time helping people fix this because the integration automatically adds the addon silently with bad settings because the user did not read the prompts.

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I would not want the nightmare of trying to describe how something is ‘not supoorted’ (HACS) while simultaneously being folded into the normal UX in that manner.

The current placement of HACS reinforces it’s separate nature from a support perspective. It’s hard enough as is.

No i prefer the separation. Especially for HACS.

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I could see how it might be easier if when installing an integration via HACS that the integration install process in HACS would automatically open the integration configuration dialogue for the integration.

But that would only work for those custom integrations that are UI configurable. Not all are. So then there has to be a way to explain that the custom integration is yaml config only.

and that would have to be implemented via the HACS integration and not via HA itself so I really doubt the HACS dev wants to do more work than they are already doing.

This has nothing at all to do with add-ons since that’s outside the scope of HACS.

So the same thing would need to be done via the add-on install process too for every add-on. I don’t run a Supervised install so I don’t use add-ons but I doubt that the Supervisor could easily be configured to know exactly which integration (or integrations) that the add-on uses inside HA to be able to launch the correct integration config dialogue box.

You can see how this adds a whole lot of work for likely very little benefit.

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