Intentionally chose an open ecosystem for the smart relays in my house, now they crippled the app adding a $4 subscription
If you don't pay a subscription you can't see the history of use, it's limited to the latest 5 events. When I bought the ten devices (=I paid 150 euro for the hardware), it was 100 events
HA has gotten a lot better in the last year if you haven't used it in a while. I honestly don't feel it's cumbersome. Gone are the days of needing to use YAML code.
HomeAssistant is not cumbersome in the slightest. The only issue is that you have to set it up yourself, so if you do it poorly then it’s cumbersome. People post beautiful dashboards and automation blueprints daily multiple places around the internet.
Honestly the most mildly infuriating thing is that you have this whole bunch of devices tightly integrated with an easy local solution and you decided to use their cloud app. You never use the cloud app! It’s always a trap. I don’t even use the Nabu Casa cloud stuff from HA.
I'm sorry, but it really is. I'm a developer and have been in IT for years and it was still one of the most complex apps I've ever dealt with. It's up and running now, but not without dozens of hours of tinkering, trial and error, weird niche forums, thousands of reddit and stack overflow posts, and honestly learning python
must have been a while since you used HA, i have everything set up without writing a single line of code whatsoever. no custom YAML, no custom python, everything done 100% from the GUI. getting my shelly devices in HA was just as easy as getting them in the Shelly app. I installed the shelly integration (pure GUI from within HA itself, took me 30sec) and all devices were auto-discovered.
Oh it's super cumbersome and a huge pain in the ass to set up. I say this as someone who has been using it for years in my house.
Doing any setup in HA just feels like pulling teeth, even something as simple as a timer is far more complex than it should be.
Once it's all set up it looks nice and generally works great, my only complaint is the mobile app loads slow, it takes like a second to display the dash after it opens.