Athom/Homey

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Athom/Homey

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Selected products from this vendor are presented on this page, with my assessments where I have personal experiences to share. The links are primarily directed to the vendor’s own pages, in English; for local pages/prices you will have to conduct your own search.

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. 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, and the SmartThings hub has been uninstalled. The devices connected to Homey can be brought over to Apple Home via the app HomeKitty (which has replaced HomeyKit), which works better than Homey’s own beta support for Apple Home. This is not in the least due to HomeKitty allowing you to choose which devices to expose to Apple Home, whereas Homey’s own solution includes every device.

Our experiences

The Homey serves an indispensable role in our smart home, serving as the main mechanism for connecting various Zigbee, Z-Wave, and other devices that are not otherwise compatible with Apple Home.

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

Component Room Experiences

Homey base station

Basement living room

If we didn’t base our smart home on Apple Home as the primary integration and programming platform, we could probably get by quite well with the Homey, even though some aspects, especially the programming, seems a little more cumbersome than what I am used to. It is also a little vulnerable in that one is dependent on app developers who update the apps when manufacturers make changes in protocols/firmware, something that can take time. In any case, Homey has become an integrated part of our setup, and it is the primary solution for one of the IKEA Trådfri base stations (which eventually developed serious problems with the Apple Home connection), integration of Logitech Harmony into Apple Home, exploiting the Netatmo wind gauge (to control the sunscreen in the living room), connecting some Mill products with Aqara sensors, a Nexa smart plug, Tibber into Apple Home, and a Fibaro motion sensor.