The open home is our vision for the smart home. It defines the values that we put at the center of every decision we make at Home Assistant. It’s woven into our architecture, licensing, community, and everything else.
The Open Home is about privacy, selection and durability.
If you prefer video, skip it until the end.
privacy
Your home should be your safe place. A place where you can be the real you without worrying about what the world thinks of you. A place where you don’t have to act differently to avoid an algorithm categorizing your behavior.
privacy for open home means that the devices have to work locally. Nobody else needs to know whether to turn on a lightbulb or change the thermostat.
It’s okay for a product to offer cloud connectivity, but it should be extra and optional.
selection
Devices in your home collect data about themselves and their surroundings. Your data. Vendors shouldn’t be able to restrict your access to your data or the interoperability of your devices with the rest of your smart home.
selection for the open home means that devices have to make the collected data available via local APIs. This avoids vendor lock-in and enables users to design their own smart home with devices from different manufacturers.
durability
If tech companies are very good at one thing, it is new product launches. However, the maintenance of the products and their functionality is a minor matter for most of them. The result is that vendors can choose to no longer support your device, affect its functionality, or even prevent it from working at all.
As we install more and more devices in our home, durability becomes more and more important. We shouldn’t have to buy everything new every couple of years because the manufacturer decided to keep going.
durability for the open home means that devices are designed and built in such a way that they continue to work. Not just this year, but for the next decade.
State of the open house
At the State of Open Home we presented our vision and how we are working with our friends from open source and science to make it a reality.
