| I've been using Home Assistant for about three years. I was very glad it exists. I wanted to make the most out of it. It has numerous problems and regressions are very frequent. The disappointment lies in it not being as it's described and in the fact that its development process doesn't appear to improve, nor does its overall quality appear to improve. It still gains new features in spite of all of these issues. Home Assistant's dashboards and UI have regressions in every single release. Many such regressions aren't fixed quickly or remain that way permanently. Github issues get closed by the bot. New features ship in every release without fixing these bugs. This gave me the impression that the developers employed by Nabu Casa have very little time to focus on bugs and that there's no pre-release QA. The graphs and their history had plenty of bugs in the 2025.1 release. Are there plans to improve the development process to improve quality? Home Assistant is described on its home page as "Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.". A Home Assistant OS download is useless offline and without the Nabu Casa infrastructure. A download of a Home Assistant OS image obtained today would be completely useless in 5 years for now. These are completely useless if Nabu Casa's infrastructure goes away for any reason. Do you have plans to address this? Another point related to Home Assistant being local and making privacy a priority, Home Assistant downloads all icons from [1]. The GitHub issue [2] has been open for a while without any involvement from the developers. The Home Assistant container image doesn't include all the assets required for it to provide a Home Assistant deployment in a container. Is this something you plan to address or should it be handled in a fork of Home Assistant meant to be run completely locally? Home Assistant bundles numerous dependencies [3]. The Home Assistant container bundles and has all of these available. Are there any plans to let users disable all cloud only integrations? What's done to assess the security of these numerous packages? This matters because people allow Home Assistant to access their indoor cameras, door locks and other potentially sensitive devices. Some malicious code run from one compromised dependency's __init__.py could have serious consequences. Home Assistant is a Python monolith. Adding something as simple as a shell command to my configuration requires a restart of Home Assistant. Are there any plans to split this up or to improve the architecture to not have such issues anymore? The energy dashboard is extremely limited. Are there plans to make this more flexible? Why are you forcing people to use encryption since 2025.1? I was including these backups in my encrypted backups anyway. The voice functionality for Home Assistant and voice PE require a cloud service or a local machine with a GPU for good performance. Are there any plans to address this to provide higher performance local voice control? The old Rhasspy (the version released before Nabu Casa hired its developer) seemed to work a lot better with defined sentences and was faster. I've seen Home Assistant become faster over the last three years. My YAML had to be updated a few times. New features have been introduced to the dashboards. Old issues and limitations are still there. The dashboards gain new features while the number of bugs and regressions also increases. The custom resources for custom cards don't always load in the mobile app. The UI still loads all the icons from the Nabu Casa icons site [1]. Home Assistant frequently stops updating my location (home vs away) and requires deletion of the device from HA to get it to work again. Entities don't update in the dashboard sometimes. Home Assistant is described as being an open source project which has been donated or moved to the Open Home Foundation. Why does it still require a CLA to be signed, just like corporate open source projects? Setting up Home Assistant for someone who's non-technical is a terrible idea. This is an even bigger issue if they want it set up and left alone without updates/maintenance. The mobile app would probably stop working properly with this installation or they'd break it at some point by installing updates. I'll wait for a bit longer while I prepare to migrate away from Home Assistant and Home Assistant OS. I'm considering a setup which uses Home Assistant core to trigger automations and to display a dashboard. All the automations and device integrations would be done with other tools. This would reduce exposure to Home Assistant's regressions and avoid Home Assistant OS's limitations. [1] the Nabu Casa run icons site - https://brands.home-assistant.io [2] https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549 [3] Home Assistant Python requirements https://github.com/home-assistant/core/blob/dev/requirements... |
Particularly annoying is automated issue closure on GitHub. Imagine spending your free time debugging an issue and describing it meticulously only to see it ignored and closed a few months down the line. I can’t but think about all the burned users who’d inevitably stop reporting anything at all. How does that affect project’s quality?