Who is Simple Mode supposed to be for? Who’s the audience for Home Assistant in Simple Mode, who are the people it’s not able to reach without Simple Mode?
I guess what I’m asking is, why would someone inexperienced with home automation choose Home Assistant in Simple Mode, instead of just sticking with HomeKit or Amazon Alexa or Google Home?
Because to me, it seems like maybe that’s not a large audience. “The masses” or the “non-power users”, why are they leaving HomeKit? (Or Amazon, or Google.) Devices in these ecosystems are easy to find, ready-made products, and installing them into the associated controller is reasonably easy.
These ecosystems are promoted by major vendors that people have made big commitments to (Apple, Google). “Regular” people in those ecosystems are pretty happy with what they have. What’s missing enough or making them unhappy enough to look around for a replacement that’s not just a different flavor from the Big Three? Enough that they’ll find and be interested in a (by comparison) small little open source tool?
Note: I’m not suggesting that the effort isn’t worthwhile. I think it’s a very reasonable goal to have Home Assistant’s “out of the box” be better, easier to understand. And to have it be highly usable for core functionality without seeing a single line of YAML.
But I do think it’s worth thinking about who that’s for. If it’s for “the masses”, and Simple Mode is all they will ever use…I don’t think there are that many of those “masses” out there. I think those folks will stick with HomeKit, etc.
I would suggest that perhaps Simple Mode should be more about on-boarding—a process or temporary stage—rather than a permanent user interface mode. I suspect that’s the real goal here, to make getting started easier and more approachable.
(Having just gone through my first two weeks of “onboarding” with Home Assistant, I can say that the default Simple Mode was actually more confusing than Advanced Mode. Indeed, it took me a few hours to even figure out that there was a Simple mode, which I was trapped in, and that’s why the user interface looked different from all of the doc and third-party tutorials…)