Just got my hands on a new Homey Bridge. Is it something that could work for a smart home?
Homey Bridge was introduced on September 7th by Athom. Homey Bridge is a little bit different than the traditional Homey Pro, or Home Assistant. The biggest difference is that you need an internet connection at all times to make it work. The reason for this is that the Homey Bridge does not have any storage or local processing capacity at all – everything is done in the Cloud. So why do you need Homey Bridge? It is a “local antenna” for Z-wave, Zigbee, Bluetooth, Infrared, and 433MHz devices so they can communicate with the cloud.
And this might also be the biggest issue with this “controller”. If you lose your internet connection, you are left out in the dark.
Homey Pro and Homey Bridge share the same principle regarding one app for every brand you want to connect to. If you have an IKEA smart bulb, you need an IKEA app on the Homey device. If you have a Fibaro device, you need a Fibaro app on the Homey device – and so on.
And here we meet our first issue. There is not an app for all brands that you might want to connect with. Now we have to admit that the Homey Bridge is still in a Beta phase – but still, if you can’t connect a device to your smart home controller – the controller is no good.
I have tested the bridge for a couple of days now, and if I put aside the issue with missing apps for devices, the unit works OK I guess. Since it is connected to the internet at all times, I was worried about latency for automation – but this is no issue at all.
Could this work in the future? I guess so, but then again – if you can’t connect a device to the smart home controller, then you have an issue. I think I stick to Home Assistant for now.