[crystaln]

Lots of people asking in the forums to hire someone, and the answer always amount to that it's not reliable enough to do a professional install.

Maybe it's reliable for you, however why has no one built a professional installer service on the platform?

[Toutouxc]

I don't think that reliability is the issue. Hass is very reliable, it's just (IMO) a bitch to configure. There's a lot of clicking and fiddling in the not-sure-if-mobile-or-desktop web interface, the menus aren't that well structured, some stuff (less and less, to be fair) needs to be configured in YAML and you don't even get an easy way to access the main config files (there's an addon, which doesn't work for some installation methods).

[crystaln]

So why is nobody doing this professionally?

[rickdeckard]

Because HA has no sufficient separation between the frontend and the backend. The platform itself is stable, but the user-experience cannot be isolated

The result of a professional delivery of a HA-solution would not be the product "HA", but the custom solution that was built on top of it.

Once deployed, the solution cannot follow the maintenance cycle of the HA-backend without risking to break the frontend experience of your customer, which means unpredictable work-hours to maintain the solution (get stuff to work again, rebuilding broken functionality using new methods, etc.)

To use it professionally, one of the biggest needs would be that the frontend versioning is decoupled from the backend, so a professional could deploy your custom solution based on HA version A with frontend version A, and regardless how often HA is upgraded to version B, C, D, X, the frontend will still be version A until it is manually migrated (possibly as a paid maintenance service).

But what this means is, that alot of development effort would need to be put into backwards-compatibility to older frontends and testing of all the permutations whenever a new release of the backend is done.

The (reasonable) decision of the community is to not do that, and instead put the energy into evolving HA as a whole.

But yeah, I wouldn't want to deploy this professionally and be in fear every time a new version is released...

[xiwenc]

Perhaps due to demand and the variety of system compositions possible.

I have been using HA since early days. If i have to pay someone to build it, i would be very poor. The amount of time and effort put into it, it’s insane. And environment changes regularly.

So i think there is no professional service because of the high complexity and the customers don't have much budget for this.

It is possible to assemble very specific setup of hardware and configuration that could work out of the box. Kinda like a HA distribution that has been tested rigorously against a predefined set of supported hardware systems.

[plagiarist]

Harder to sell the service contracts when the user has that much control?

[denis1]

The problem of reliability isn't really with Home Assistant. It comes from the pain of integrating the almost-but-not-quite compatible cheap Chinese devices that claim to work with a standard, but don't.

The ecosystem is so fragmented between cheap race-to-the-bottom gadgets and the more expensive "works only with OUR app" that integrating anything more than just a few bulbs is a pain.

And that's not even considering the amount of customer support that someone doing this professionally would have to provide.

[criddell]

Why would installers deal with cheap Chinese devices? Every installer I’ve dealt with has a relatively small selection of vendors and devices that they know and trust. They aren’t reselling random crap from Amazon.

[TeMPOraL]

No, they're each having a relatively small selection of vendors re-selling white-label Chinese crap.

In my case: local A/C installers are reselling Haier aircons. Good hardware. Shit software (see "tale of the two apps" elsewhere in this thread). Or, a nice local company selling floor heating solutions. Got electric floor heating from them. Control panels have "smart home integration". Guess who made that? Tuya. The world's finest seller of white-label "smart" devices. Complete with a shit app.

Home Assistant is the only thing that makes the two device classes more convenient remotely than through an IR remote or using the wired-in control panels.

[daredoes]

Right there with you that the amount of customer support needed for such a service kills the incentive. I already hate having to fix my house when something breaks or a battery dies. The last thing I want is Joe Schmoe calling me up at 2am because his power went out and shorted the home server, and he has no backups because he disabled the ones I set them up with while "tinkering"

[xolox]

I've had plenty of trouble with Home Assistant upgrades randomly breaking smart devices from well known vendors, e.g. whenever I update I dread to find out whether my Neato vacuum robot is still supported or whether that integration has crapped out again. Same for my LG smart tv and several other devices. I love Home Assistant but it's not exactly rock solid...

[crystaln]

Seems like a professional could just limit their install to known reliable devices?