I’ve installed Home Assistant for the first time this weekend, and I’m fiddling with a lot of different components to get all my different devices to talk to each other.
A couple of things I’ve had to include come from HACS, and at least one is pretty solid and no-fuss: the SonoffLAN from @AlexxIT. “SamsungTV Tizen” also seems solid, at least in theory - haven’t tested yet. Another one seems to be in slow development, the SmarThinQ LGE Sensors (by a bunch of people?).
This got me wondering…
Could a stable HACS integration get moved into the main HA platform?
And is it possible to get help from “the main developers” on custom integrations, like the LGE components (which suffer from a hidden LG API)?
Or would only official “official” integrations (i.e. which there’s a formal agreement between the device company and HA team) land in the main group?
Would be interesting to see some sort of “stability levels” for HACS integrations, i.e. “in dev”, “unstable” (not tested with many different devices), “staging” and then, ready for “promotion” into main HA.
It’s not necessarily (or at all…) to do with “stability”.
It has to do with the number of hoops to jump thru to add the integration to the HA core. If the developer of a custom integration wants to take the time to do all of the necessary things to get it included in core it’s up to them if it’s worth it.
A custom integration (whether available thru HACS or installed manually) doesn’t have any of those hoops. The developer creates the integration and then just puts it out there for people to use.
There are custom integrations that have worked fine for potentially years with no updates and there are lots of buggy integrations in core that are being fixed (or sometimes not fixed - I heard of a bug report recently that hasn’t been fixed in over three years) on a regular basis.
Being in HACS itself is no guarantee of stability or instability. Which is why for many custom integrations you will get a warning in your logs telling you that the integration hasn’t been tested by HA and could cause issues.
And it’s why the core dev teams won’t give you any assistance for custom integrations. That is solely the responsibility of the integration developer or users of the integration on the forum.
as far as any official integrations being based on a formal agreement between HA and the company I don’t think that happens very often if at all. Most of the integrations are using public (or not) API’s and such that HA is leveraging for it’s integrations.
Which is why some of the HA core integrations get messed with as much as they do. They are at the mercy of the vendor changing the interface to their devices/services.