About the vendor and its products

Athom for a long time offered one product; their Homey base station. This supports a large number of protocols and devices; it is claimed that 50,000 products are compatible. What is somewhat out of the ordinary is that Athom itself only delivers the operating system and a few apps, with the system being based on apps for devices being developed by either the producers of the devices themselves or enthusiasts that want devices they own to work with Homey. In the fall of 2021, a new product was announced, called Homey Bridge, which is a smaller and cheaper base station, and a second generation Homey Pro has been announced for delivery in 2023.

We have installed a Homey in our house, as HomeKit support was announced in December 2018. The intention with the acquisition was to investigate partly whether our Homebridge server could be decommissioned and partly whether our Samsung SmartThings hub, which was only purchased to integrate a couple of Z-Wave components, could be taken out of the system. After having installed the Homey, I have ascertained that there are indeed Homey app for most of the products we have. In some cases, this offers opportunities we previously did not have, in other cases, the integration is less satisfying and works better via Homebridge.

Our experiences

What for a while justified the purchase of the Homey is that it allows connecting Aqara components without the Aqara hub, albeit with some issues. After having also acquired an Aqara hub, the Homey is now a solution that don’t work through SmartThings or Homebridge. What works where can be unpredictable and often requires trial-and-error.

Notice that on phones, the table might only display in landscape mode