I have found Home Assistant to be very user unfriendly and difficult to use. I have about $1000 in switches that are among the most popular Z-Wave devices on the market that I have not been able to get working, as well as other devices. I'm admittedly clueless with hardware, but I build software for a living. The few things that do work required hours of spelunking on forums into incomprehensible details of configuration. It's not a system I'd recommend to a typical consumer.
I had a similar experience with Home Assistant a couple years ago, but they’ve made a ton of progress on UX recently. I still wouldn’t recommend for a typical consumer, but should be easy for someone building their own apps.
Agreed! It was really terrible, it's much better now - at least you don't need to fiddle with YAML anymore for most things. There's still a ways to go, but for the audience reading this, it should be accessible.
HA is not the easiest system to get into, but once you are there is is fantastic.
It is a state machine that I also use for some other software, not to mention that it has tons of integrations.
I use Zigbee and it took me 10 minutes to have it successfully running (via MQTT autodiscovery, or via the ZHE module (which I tested byt keep with MQTT)).
It certianly is not something would suggest to my parents, but someone who is technical (especially with software, and especially-especially with Python) it is not difficult.
The main issue is how the docs are organized, it takes quite sometime to understand the way the whole thig works. After that it is downhill.
Finally there is a strong move to the UI where many things become click-n-go.
