It is an interesting data point, but I think you are right, this is the wrong conclusion. My wife rarely if ever opens the app, but she does occasionally come to me and request a feature or report a bug. To me, this is ideal. I know she is getting something out of it when we travel and she comments on how the place we are staying requires a lot of manual interaction.
Thank you! The fact that we get a road map (been looking forward to this post for months) is great. A lot of companies don’t even tell us what they are working on.
The system continues to get better every month.
I would like to throw one thing out there: I’d appreciate some focus on the voice area that isn’t about LLM, but is more focused on quality of life. Right now, the triggering is off (it triggers when it shouldn’t), and misses the request enough that my wife doesn’t really use it. The one I have is routed through nabu casa right now. I’m really only looking for it to manage a grocery list, not talk to me or converse.
Anyway, I appreciate the dev team. I’ve been a user for many many years and seeing the transformation is excellent. Thank you for all your hard work!
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Introducing the Device Database
To make all this work, we also need a centralized, structured place to store and share device knowledge. That’s where the Device Database—a brand new project from the Open Home Foundation—comes in.
Think of it as a source of truth created, curated, and validated by the community. A place where we gather everything from metadata (like power usage or infrared codes) to factual information (setup instructions such as how to add or reset a device) to real-world setup insights and community creations (such as automation examples). It will contain information users intentionally submit to the database, nothing will be collected automatically without your explicit consent.
Are the developers of the upcoming device database aware of existing community device databases Zigbee2MQTT’s supported devices data collection (by Koenkk) as well as the Zigbee Device Compatibility Repository
(by @blakadder) as that the metadata from those existing databases can also be used?
We’re working with Nabu Casa—our commercial partner—to create the most reliable hardware antennas that support more open protocols, such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and more, to the Home Assistant ecosystem.
Please stop referring the upcoming Z-Wave Controller USB dongle as a ”Z-Wave antenna” as the ”antannas” do not make those things work!
Digital radios are not just ”antennas” and fact is that the antenna part does not contain any protocol!
Highly recommend that instead call it a ”Z-Wave Controller” or ” Z-Wave radio adapter”, because that is what it is. And in general, when in an USB form factor they should really be refered to as USB radios and USB radio dongles, or RF adapters for short. In the specific case of Z-Wave see:
And in the case of Zigbee Coordinator radios read:
Regardless, the new product will be a Z-Wave radio adapter and it while it will have an externas antenna, the whole product itself is not an ”antenna”. So it hurts my OCD when use the wrong terminology for what the product to be sold really is. The actual antenna part of the product is more or less just a dumb copperwire in an tube, which while important for getting the radio to recive signal reception is not as digital radio chip and microcontroller which runs the protocol stack make the product work and other components on the circuit board which makes well. Calling the whole thing just a ”Z-Wave antenna” makes you sound like a marketing person who do not care what the product actually does, as calling it that is like calling a radio an antenna → Antenna (radio) - Wikipedia
Please do not treach this community to use the wrong terminology!
For reference, below is a drawing of an alien and that alien has antennas. Note that it is not just a drawing of just its antennas (if so then they could just as well be drawn for an insect), and if it was only then should I write that it was a drawing of some antennas:
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Z2m is in the open home foundation.
Excellent plan.
It would be great to get some integration organisation like for devices, to make it easier to find and select what you need for your task.
It would also be nice to get some of the common custom cards rolled in to the standard set!
Looking forward to all the exciting new features this year. Well less sexy, it would also be good to add in a dedicated plan for improving documentation and training.
The larger HomeAssistant’s user base grows, the more important clear and complete documentation will be.
There’s this one from 2022: Energy Dashboard doesn't display 'consumed solar' in some scenarios · Issue #13701 · home-assistant/frontend · GitHub
Apparently there was a fix in 2025.5, but it doesn’t look like it’s working.
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Exciting to see how this pans out. I hope it will improve the setup of prescense detection and temperature control in HA as the setup now is very manual and “simple”.
I feel like HA is now pushing more and more towards a UI only approach by adding things that depend on the UI to be configured. This is not necessarily bad but I wish there was more focus on improving things for people who like a more declarative approach by using text based setups with git as a source of truth.
For example being able to define an entity with tags and metadata via text and then have a decent scripting engine without using pyscript to loop entities by tag and do things with the metadata would be great. I could have an entity with some metadata defining the action I want and then use python to discover those entities by tag and create automations based on metadata. This is really easy in openhab while in home assistant I see no progress in that direction. With LLMs using text gets easier and easier and IMHO makes setups more solid.
I personally don’t care about dashboard look or voice so from my point of view I see very few improvement. But probably I am just a niche. Also there is still no way to automatically reload scripts and yaml on change you always have to go to the dev console and reload.
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I also agree the percentages of people directly interacting with HA are hard to interpret. It tells us dashboards are not the primary means by which Home Assistant affects daily lives.
0% of our family members ever directly interact with the things under the bonnet of our car. Let’s not invest too much in trying to change that.
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A device database and standardized automations sound too good to be true. The first things coming into my my mind are the awesome custom battery note integration and the respective battery blueprint, so helpful and required by everyone. Could be a good start…
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It’s the same in my home—personally, I don’t want my family to need an app to control the lights, temperature, or media player. The fewer apps required, the better. That’s what buttons and voice assistants are for, among other things.
I believe a truly smart home is one you don’t even notice is there. The more interaction required with Home Assistant, the less effective the smart home becomes.
Given that, I think it’s essential to improve the voice assistant so that it becomes a valid means of daily interaction and is accepted by the whole family.
Would you like help refining this into a more formal version or keeping it conversational?
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Thanks for the roadmap update! 
And nice to see that the fridge example (Roadmap 2024 Mid-year Update: A home-approved smart home, peace of mind, and more! - #29 by Lakini) survived through the various occasions that it popped up in.
One thing I find confusing about this post though:
“we don’t always know that those entities together form, say, a fridge”.
I’m not sure which type of problem you are planning to address.
a) a Samsung smart fridge that already today shows up as one device has a number of entities, but Home Assistant on a higher level doesn’t know the concept of a fridge and can therefore e.g. not propose good automations?
b) a “dumb” fridge was made smart by combining the entities of OTHER devices (magnet sensors, temp sensors, power measure plugs, …), but HA doesn’t allow to easily combine those entities into a new device?
c) both a and b?
If it’s option b (allowing users to combine all kinds of entities to “new” devices), then
“we also need a centralized, structured place to store and share device knowledge”
would still be a great initiative in itself, but wouldn’t solve the problem. One dumb-turned-smart fridge might rely on a self-built esphome node, another one might be based on the combination of various zigbee devices from different companies. Or are you planning to not just have a device database that allows people to store information about concrete models (“This is the Samsung SuperSmartFreeze 2000, …”), but one that allows the community to enhance HA’s overall understanding of household items by providing templates on a higher level (“a fridge is usually used in the kitchen, in a food/cooking context. it might have multiple door sensors, temperature sensors, and a thermostat setting, …”)?
Another thing that is halfway related to the topic:
“What’s the temperature in the kitchen?” shouldn’t return the freezer’s internal temperature.”
This is coming from an exclusion side so to say (=> what NOT to take into account for a question). What would be great to implement instead or as an extension: the ability to define the primary/leading source per sensor metric, per area or context.
Example: my HA has 3 sensors that provide an outdoor temperature. A zigbee sensor to the north side, an esphome node on the balcony to the south, and a weather forecast service temperature. At the moment there is no clean way to define which one the leading should be for the voice assistant to answer a question about the outdoor temperature. I could of course create a template sensor named “outdoor temperature” that takes the values from the other 3 with a logic of my liking. But that’s not necessarily beginner-friendly
There is more thoughts around this in my head. As mentioned in other contexts before: the moment you got it sorted how you would like to organise non-NC-productmanagement-input from the community (from people like me who cannot code well enough to contribute feature-wise ), just let me know, happy to contribute!
The fact there are ??? on the roadmap graphic for this area spells disaster.
I purposely don’t disclose too much information online, but I do cybersecurity for one of the largest tech and entertainment companies in the world. Most people are utilizing our products and services everyday, even if you don’t realize it. Being able to do RBAC (role based access control) like many of us posted about during the Month of WTH, means needing to incorporate the security model into the object models from day one… not thought of down the road. Any and all thoughts of security and privacy need to be thought about before any other work on entities, devices, and dashboards begins.
Can security be retrofitted after the fact? Sure… happens everyday unfortunately, and is extremely difficult, time consuming and resource hungry.
Just my 2-cents.
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Ah yes, lets rebuild HA from the ground up. That will be quick and won’t take up too many resources.
My apologies if my intent/thoughts were misconstrued through my writings.
Based on the roadmap presented for 2025, a lot of work will performed, correct? Some of it will create changes to the core system, correct?
My warning was that if all that additional work is to be performed, think about security/privacy at the beginning and in parallel, not down the road after the fact.
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I want HA to have a deeper understanding of my home. It should know how many people live here, how many doors to the outside, and how rooms are connected. It can then understand that if two people are in the house and detected in the Family Room, there is no way the detection in the office is a personal, so don’t turn on the lights. My significant other is getting more and more annoyed by HA doing things that do not appear reasonable. I am updating things as I can but I just don’t have the time to address everything.
I do not expect this. It is what I want. When I get some free time, I will contribute to the project.
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This seems like you are collecting and maintaining a list of devices that are in my home, which seems to be a contradiction of the longstanding mission statement about respecting users privacy
Your answer does not make sense to me. How is a list of devices with the knowledge of how the entities interact with each other different than a list of devices that already exists for your smart home? One does not correlate with the other.