Home Assistant says ‘Big tech ruined the cloud, so we’re out’

The open-source smart home platform Home Assistant is kicking the cloud to the curb — in name at least. “We are renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, because we hate clouds,” founder Paulus Schoutsen told The Verge in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “Big tech ruined the cloud, so we’re out.” The move is part of a long-term strategy Schoutsen and his team have been pursuing to make Home Assistant a mainstream smart home platform. Schoutsen says most users find the powerful platform after hitting the limits of mainstream options like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Home. But it has a steep learning curve, and that’s what he’s looking to change. I spoke with Schoutsen at the Z-Wave Summit in Boca Raton, Florida, this week about the changes and Home Assistant’s future plans, which include lowering barriers to entry by developing simpler dashboards, making setup more intuitive, and using generative AI to reduce complexity. He also said they plan to launch a new hub next year that’s more user-friendly. “We’re growing up.” "“You don’t have to trust me not to misuse your data because I just don’t have your data.”" - Paulus Schoutsen Renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Link is mostly symbolic. The features stay the same, aside from some back-end improvements to speed and reliability. The new name also tries to address a concern some new users had that it meant Home Assistant ran in the cloud, says Schoutsen. Home Assistant runs on local hardware and controls your smart home locally, but this means once you leave your home network, you can’t control anything. For $6.50 a month or $65 a year, Home Assistant Link gives you a convenient way to access your Home Assistant instance from anywhere, alongside the option to enable other internet-dependent features such as integration with Alexa and Google voice control, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and encrypted backups. [Image: Nabu Casa published this graphic to explain its perspective on the differences between Home Assistant Link and other cloud services. The move addresses an awkward dynamic for the platform. Schoutsen and his team have spent years campaigning against proprietary cloud ecosystems, which he believes hurt the smart home, and encouraging people not to buy cloud-dependent products, all while offering a service with “cloud” in the name. However, unlike some cloud services, Home Assistant Cloud was never mandatory, and you could always replicate everything it provided with other methods; the same remains true for Link. Schoutsen says Link is also different from many cloud services because it has no access to your data. Link is run by Nabu Casa, Home Assistant’s commercial partner, and all Link traffic is encrypted. “We can’t see it, and we don’t want to,“ he says. “You don’t have to trust me not to misuse your data because I just don’t have your data.” The service provides a revenue stream to fund the platform’s development, with 60 percent of the profit going to the non-profit Open Home Foundation that runs Home Assistant. [Image: Home Assistant had its first ever booth at a trade show this year, attending the IFA consumer technology conference in Berlin in September. For Home Assistant, cloud-dependent products are a hard no. “The cloud is ruining how people think of the smart home,” says Schoutsen, pointing to the recent examples of Nest shutting off the cloud for its early thermostats, smart TVs sending your data to the cloud without you knowing, and Weber sunsetting the June Oven’s servers. “Now you have a dumb oven that cost $1,500. It’s crazy,” he says. “People get so used to it and get so disappointed by it.” The cloud isn’t all bad, Schoutsen concedes. Speech-to-text, backups, and AI work better online, but the problem is products that stop working without it. He wants product manufacturers to commit to offering local control by default, using open standards (Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, ESPHome), never locking basic features behind a cloud, and allowing users to control their own data. “I’d love to see a nutrition label on boxes showing if a product is cloud-dependent or not,” he says, adding that they’re building a database to help consumers find products that aren’t fully reliant on the cloud. This stance against the cloud is likely to appeal to consumers who are increasingly concerned about who has access to their data. But Home Assistant still has a long way to go before it becomes mainstream. Schoutsen says Home Assistant is installed in an estimated 2.7 million homes, but that’s still a fraction of the reach of Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, and Apple Home. Winning over mainstream users will be hard. [Image: The Home Assistant Green hub is one way to get started with the smart home platform. You can also use your own hardware. The biggest barrier to entry is complexity. Home Assistant does a lot, meaning you have a lot of choice, which can be overwhelming. “If you want to try something with Home Assistant, the answer is never no,” says Schoutsen. “We want everything to be possible, which means that the UX is more complicated, and that scares people.” In comparison, “You open Apple Home, and there’s like nothing you can do,” he says. Over the last few years, the team has been working to remove those barriers without taking away functionality. “We’re looking to lower the floor without lowering the ceiling,” he says. There are plans to launch a successor to the Home Assistant Green hub that will be easier to set up. “We want to make it more like onboarding a Philips Hue hub,” says Schoutsen. They are also working to make the UX easier and will integrate the HACS community store — where users find and install community-built integrations — into Home Assistant next month. This should make integrations easier to find and set up. “If people haven’t tried Home Assistant in over a year, they should give it a shot,” he says. "“We’re looking to lower the floor without lowering the ceiling.”" - Paulus Schoutsen Another big push that could turn into a major selling point for the platform is a “No Device Left Behind” program. Nabu Casa is developing devices that will more easily bring people’s existing analog or legacy tech into the platform — such as old receivers, AC units, solar panel inverters, even TVs — using technology such as serial, IR, and Modbus. Schoutsen sees AI as a big driver for Home Assistant. “AI is going to solve the complexity problem, and our biggest weakness is becoming our biggest strength,” he says. As a broad, open platform that can bring together data and controls from across your smart home, Home Assistant could provide a useful foundation for AI agents. I used Claude to set up Home Assistant last year, and it was a big improvement over trying to figure out what on earth YAML was. “Soon you’re just going to have your agent configure your software for you,” he says. “Because people don’t want the software, they just want the solution that comes out of it.” Schoutsen acknowledges that agents raise obvious privacy concerns, but says Home Assistant keeps your data at home and you can choose which agent to trust with it, including one that runs locally. Ultimately, Home Assistant may not need to reinvent itself to win over the mainstream if it can become the foundational layer that lets your home talk to your AI agent or platform of choice. “If you just have a box in your house that runs Home Assistant that connects all your data to your agents or to, say, Apple Home, that’s great,” he says. “That’s a win for Home Assistant.”