Suggested Direction for Home Assistant

Implement updates to Home Assistant so that companies can use it with their products. So, instead of each company creating their own phone App, Web App, etc., they can leverage Home Assistant.

A company like Shelly seems like a good place to start.

If you are asking what I think you are asking. No. It simply won’t happen. Not because of HA either… Although you don’t want the HA dev team trying to cede to every companies demands to add tracking features.

Basically, companies will never cede access to thier user groups or the ability to control thier service. Ok maybe never is too strong. Practically close to never. (see what Philips is currently doing with Hue - they’re going the other direction, requiring login). Over the next few years, I strongly suspect we will have to work harder to maintain our local control. (see the Mazda action last week)

They (company execs) feel (true or no) there is intrinsic value to having a captured user base using thier “service” (yes craptacular boring app). But the word in the boardroom is ‘our service’) and the execs of those companies would not see an - open platform designed to allow users privacy - as a means to provide that service. Its exactly what they DON’T want.
So you can imagine this is problematic if you’re a typical electronics company exec unfortunately… You want to know everything they do so you could figure out how to ‘monetize’ it.

So this is another one of those things that is less likely to happen than if you wait for Harrison Ford to star in live action Star Wars as Han Solo again… (read:not happening)

4 Likes

An MQTT update platform is available:

I agree. Companies are obsessed with getting subscriptions and a continuous revenue stream. Look at whats happening with myq now.

Local control goes against their plans for subscription revenue. They want you in their app and ecosystem.

Updates already work with Shelly.

There is a relevant blog entry

4 Likes