[sanguy]

Home Assistant is great, but it will face huge hurdles as the founder tries to cash in on the popularity. It's already underway.

1) Nabu Casa was founded with a claim that "it will all be transparent and reported" as to income, etc, etc.

2) Then the "private" components happened only for Nabu Casa - like the cloud connection stuff.

3) A few years later when pointed out nothing was transparent yet the response was "We will not share this information."

3) Nabu Casa then started to hire up the more active community developers and set off on their own closed vision.

4) NC has bought up many of the associated pieces - the companion apps, the ESP32 stuff, etc, etc.

5) NC has hired many of the community developers and now quite some secrecy around the roadmaps and decisions.

6) You dare not question decisions or you get thrown off the forums and Discord channels for life. Many cases of this happening. They have a community manager who is particularly sensitive over any perceived negative comment and prone to going off to which the founder needs to step in and smooth the emotions. Not sure why they've not fired him after strike 4 or 5.

The end result is that Home Assistant is far less open than it was. It is going the same path pFsense did under the ownership of Netgate.

The challenge is many people invested into it and when it implodes it won't be pretty. I am hopeful someone forks it with a better community engagement model.

(I've been a user since the start, and a contributor in the early days. Left the community due to my work being monetized by NC without my consent.)

[robbiet480]

Hello, I’m the original creator of the Home Assistant iOS Companion App. Just wanted to clear up that Nabu Casa took over the iOS and Android apps purely because of requirements by Apple and Google around a corporation being the only entity that can have a development team. At no time did Nabu Casa pay any money to me or anyone else to acquire the apps. They were transferred to Nabu Casa purely for convenience, since Home Assistant Inc doesn’t exist.

[stingraycharles]

Do I understand correctly that you just gave the iOS app out of your hands, for Nabu Casa to maintain? Or is it solely a legal structure?

I find it interesting if it were the former, I personally would have considered monetizing it myself, but then again, it’s probably not a coincidence I haven’t founded any opensource projects as impactful as Home Assistant. :)

[robbiet480]

Nabu Casa doesn't maintain it, the community does. I personally haven't worked on it in a while now because I've been consumed with my new company but it is still being very actively developed. I still have full access to the source code and developer account and such and am a resource to whoever needs my input as time permits.

[sneak]

If the community maintains it, why hasn't the community removed the phone-home surveillance in the iOS client?

This is something I only see in packages maintained by a central authority that wants to consume the data from the community, at the expense of end user privacy.

[zacwest]

I'm the maintainer of the iOS/macOS app these days. I'm not paid by Nabu Casa and I do it in my free time (if anything, Nabu Casa has avoided doing things which may inadvertently monetize my work to not my benefit, which I appreciate).

There's no analytics nor reporting in the app. I've been slowly removing[0] things that talk to servers other than your Home Assistant server, but your private information's never left the device. Right now the app will talk to 2 additional sources, both of which you can disable in the Privacy settings:

1. alerts.home-assistant.io, which will alert for security issues but is strictly a JSON file it loads [1]

2. Firebase Cloud Messaging, for push notifications (since we can't talk to APNS directly in HA)

FCM is a dependency I'm actively trying to kill off in favor of an implementation that is both end-to-end encrypted and talks directly to Apple's Push Notification Service. Apple would not allow a solution where HA talks directly to APNS as they do not want that many active connections, and it would require disclosing private keys for the App Store account.

Unless Robbie wanted to give me his personal Apple ID password, moving the app to the Nabu Casa App Store account was the only way for me to do anything with the app.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/pull/2010 [1] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/blob/861a40a50aa201ff4...

[madjam002]

That's freakin awesome, it's so refreshing to see this, especially when Home Assistant is likely to be installed on non-techie's phones and you want to just set it and forget it.

Thank-you for all of your work on the Home Assistant iOS app, it's one of the best parts of the ecosystem imo.

[sneak]

The app privacy label on the iOS App Store directly contradicts your claims.

Is it out of date?

[sanguy]

Hey Robbie - glad to see you. Yes, the iOS app was transferred prior to Nabu Casa ramping up their current approach.

Too bad; if you hung on you could have gotten some $$$ for it. It would have made me happy to see you financially rewarded as you did contribute a lot early on.

[madjam002]

I mean it's still all open source, so what if they want to monetise some hardware and cloud connectivity? Worst that will happen is they will drive more and more into paid plans, a fork may or may not happen and there will be a community split, but for my place personally I don't see much of a risk there when most of my stuff just uses the MQTT integration.

Hopefully with money coming in they can improve the core itself, because at the moment the real value of Home Assistant is the huge community around it and 3rd party integrations.

[zsarnett]

Wow, that is a bunch of assumptions incorrectly presented as the truth! The Open Home conference in December is laying it out pretty good and shows why and how most of the above is actually miles off: https://www.home-assistant.io/state-of-the-open-home/

[sanguy]

It's a yearly state of the union. You are informed of what they want to inform you about.

Nothing "open" about it.

[gedy]

I know the HA founder and think you're mischaracterizing him and his motivations. What you call "Cashing in" is attempting to focus full time on a really terrific project. He's certainly not rich off this and could have instead gone for a commercial/closed source vs the open project it is now.

[sanguy]

He tried to sell it to Ubiquiti but they did not bite.

So he ramped up the Nabu Casa approach to "control" the top community developers to ensure he did not loose control of the project. It can only fork if momentum to fork; and if you hire all the contributors that momentum is curbed.

Many have also indicated he's also tried to sell it to Ikea as a center piece to their Smart Home line of products. This was quickly deleted and those in the know tossed off the forum.

[gedy]

I don't think he tried to sell, ubiqiti sponsored him.

[sanguy]

From Ubiquiti directly -- he tried to sell them Home Assistant. When it did not work out he left abruptly in what was described as a "temper tantrum"

[smashah]

I'm looking forward to the founders and the core maintainers being able to make a healthy living off of home assistant with the least amount of pointless overhead :)

[djanogo]

I have few more things to add...

1. There is one specific "addon" developer/employee who wraps opensource docker containers and automates the releases through github release builds and proceeds to link the about page of addon to his donation page. Example: Nodered, InfluxDB, AirSonos/Cast addons in HA have no link to actual projects or their repos.

2. Absolutely have no standard for stability for what should be critical software, just check the number of production releases to end customer devices this month. EIGHT, yes they pushed eight releases to core app to end users, that's beside the "addon" updates that the guy does with his automated releases.

3. Thanksgiving week of 2021, they pushed a ZWave update which the guy rewrote how events are processed and proceeded to brick everybody who updated.

4. F*ckin forced OS update, the developer refuses to be able to turn off forced HASS OS updates. If you block the update hostname on your router the stupid script to check updates goes crazy and starts eating up CPU.

[eisa01]

Any prospect of a an alternative commercial provider to NC for the cloud stuff?

Other open source software (E.g. LibreOffice) has several shops that help businesses with support and integration/bug fixes

[luma]

There are three major cloud components. Alexa and Google integrations both have open options that are documented by NC and you are welcome to use them. There’s a lot of setup as you need to deal with a semi-complex config on AWS or GCP which can be challenging if you’re new to those environments, but they work as well as the paid NC option.

The remote access proxy service doesn’t really have an open equivalent but there are tons of other supported solutions out there for secure remote access to your Home Assistant install. Here is one example add-on to provide Wireguard support, developed and supported by an NC employee: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-wireguard

In short, the paid cloud services provide an easier path to solutions you can deploy for yourself if you wish. You can still use equivalent services that you host yourself under your own AWS/GCP account. Those services cost NC money to host, so asking for money isn’t too far out there. Of course, that money is more than what the cloud parts cost, and what we all get in return is a team of skilled developers working full time on the project and releasing everything for free.

[llamataboot]

yeah, I don't even need the NC integration, I use a reverse proxy with SSL, but I pay the $5 a month just because they are doing such a frigging amazing job with a giant project and I want to pay something for it so they can keep doing it full time!

[anderspitman]

Nabu Casa seems like a great model to bring self-hosting to the masses.