We wanted to offer a welcoming respite from all that noise. We wanted to build a home.

Opening our door to the public

Unlike industry-only trade shows like CES in Las Vegas, IFA opens its doors directly to the public. These were the people we were aiming to connect with: everyday smart home users and curious visitors – from tech-savvy enthusiasts to those who just want their devices to work reliably, and may not yet be aware of data privacy issues.

So we filled the space with comfortable sofas, cushions, ambient lighting, plants, CDs, and a coffee corner. The goal wasn’t just to make the booth look pretty. Every design and decoration choice was intentional and part of our bigger idea: building a home.

We wanted a place where technology worked quietly in the background, all locally controlled in real time. Inspired by the Japanese concept of omotenashi (wholehearted hospitality), we created a space where we could invite visitors in to take a breath, sit down, and have a real conversation with us.

Warm welcoming, and ready to receive our guests (also a great place for me to get acquainted with the venue map).

It didn’t take long for visitors to be drawn to our booth!

We knew we were breaking the unspoken rules of a tech show, and that was the point. We didn’t have a product to sell or contracts to sign. We were simply there to share our vision of what an amazing place the smart home can be when it’s built around privacy, choice, and sustainability.

People at the heart of the home

While I realize a trade show booth may never fully look like a home, it can certainly feel like one. Cozy touches like soft furnishings help, but it’s people who bring it to life.

We had an incredible team at the booth: community volunteers who showed up every single day to give their time, endless energy, knowledge, and enthusiasm, as well as a diverse mix of friends from our partners Nabu Casa and Apollo Automation, and members of our creator network, working alongside salaried staff. We’ll be sharing more about what it’s like to be part of an event like this from the community’s perspective in coming weeks – so watch this space!

The open, relaxed space meant more chances for open, relaxed conversation.

Comfy setup, uncompromising principles

While the surroundings made people feel at home, our messaging didn’t pull any punches. Amid the homely decor were anti-corporate stickers, posters projecting our core principles, our very own magazine for people to take away and read at leisure… and one special piece of artwork: a handcrafted cross-stitch. Rather than the usual “Home sweet home,” it displayed a spicy quote from Open Home Foundation President Paulus Schoutsen:

Just me, standing innocently next to a tapestry.

That cross-stitch wasn’t just an edgy photo op (although it did attract a lot of attention, including from The Verge’s Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy): it reflected our promise to the community.

Many smart home companies are built on venture capital, which eventually forces them to monetize private data, lock features behind subscriptions, or abandon products after an acquisition. By structuring ourselves as a non-profit, our projects are permanently protected from that type of buy-out. We don’t prioritize shareholders demanding growth at all costs; we prioritize a community that values privacy, choice, and sustainability.

Stickers, mags, merch and more…

Technology that blends into the home

Of course, our guests were naturally curious about the tech powering the room, and we wanted to show them what’s possible in a way that felt practical and grounded in everyday life.

That’s where our web developer Darren stepped in. He spent weeks designing a setup that could be integrated into the living space: including an interactive CD wall that instantly changed the music using physical tags, e-ink displays, and custom ESPHome touchscreens.

If you’re curious about how the tech team pulled off such a seamless setup, here’s Darren on the behind-the-scenes engineering:

Not many people realized that the entire booth was running off a single Home Assistant Green using two ZBT-2s for Zigbee and Thread. Building the CD wall was probably my highlight because people loved that physical interaction. People were also fascinated by what e-ink could do, thanks to screens running on OpenDisplay. And despite the massive amount of Wi-Fi interference on the show floor, we had five Voice Preview Editions running Sendspin via Music Assistant that all stayed perfectly in sync with almost no issues the entire week!

I had a lot of questions about the devices we used and how we set them up, so I've done a deep dive on Reddit that goes through the technical details.

– Darren Griffin, Web Developer, Open Home Foundation

It’s fun to showcase clever gadgets, but the real point was to prove you don’t have to surrender your privacy or lock yourself into a single corporate ecosystem to have a magical smart home. Seeing Works with Home Assistant and commercial partners’ hardware running side-by-side showed open standards give you complete control, allowing devices from totally different brands to work together for you.

Visitors to our booth were able to see all the tech working in a real-life setting.

What we’re taking away

Stepping onto that busy show floor each morning reminded me why this movement is so special. Creating a welcoming space built on openness and human connection felt like a breath of fresh air for everyone who entered our booth.

A few key things will stick with us:

• Open source belongs on the main stage: Building a privacy-first smart home isn’t a niche hobby – we’re taking up space right alongside Big Tech giants.
• Local-first is the future: People are tired of cloud shutdowns and endless subscriptions; local control is what people actually want in their living rooms – and the rest of the home!
• Our community is everything: The spirit, wisdom, and warmth of our volunteers made visitors feel truly welcome. And best of all, we had a blast doing it!

Tech shows definitely don’t have to be boring.

Finally, thank you!

A massive thank you to everyone who stopped by for a coffee, took away a magazine, or shared videos and photos online. We built the room, but you made it feel like home ♥️

Did you catch our booth at IFA or see coverage online? Jump into the community forums or Reddit to share your thoughts!

On your marks…

A month ago we asked you to mark your calendars for Community Day 2026 on November 7. From today you can mark our calendar! Our Community Day Luma calendar that is 😁 All you need to get started is the desire to host and to add your meetup to the calendar!

But that’s not where the support from us stops! I’ve put my head together with our event organizer, Florencia, to make sure every host is set up for success this year. This special annual event has a new website with our Community Meetups Playbook (including reimbursement guidelines), information on how to request official merchandise, and dynamic updates of where events are being held.

Let’s get into some of those details 👀

We loved seeing your snaps from Community Day 2025!

One page to rule them all

Our Community Day website is now live! Our graphic designers and web developers went all out for you, taking what we built for our Home Assistant community page and giving it the facelift Community Day deserves 👏

On this new page you can find what Community Day is all about, some things we’re doing differently this year based on learnings from the last event, links to informational PDFs, and dynamic updates of events added to our calendar.

We provide a lot of extra information in our Community Meetups Playbook, merchandise requests form, and our FAQ. Let me break down some of that here for y’all.

A fresh new webpage, just for you!

We’ve got you covered

One big item missing last year was a Community Meetups Playbook – I’m thrilled to say we’ve got you covered with one now. Available on our new Community Day website as a downloadable PDF, this will be your guide to preparing to host a meetup. The playbook is packed with information, so let me share the key timings for hosts ahead of Community Day.

In addition to this timeline, the playbook also talks about finding the right kind of venue, how to set up your Luma event, activity ideas, and handling guest privacy when it comes to photography.

Did I lose you? 😅 Don’t worry. My team is genuinely happy to help! You can reach out to me, Florencia, Isabelle, or Inês either in the Community Day Discord channel (tag one of us!) or by emailing the team at communityday@openhomefoundation.org.

The Community department is here to help! From left to right: Isabelle, Melissa, Florencia, Missy, and Inês.

Swag, swag, swag

I won’t lie: merch for hosts was a bit of a mess last year 😬 We said one thing and then weren’t able to honor that, forcing hosts to find their own merch. So this year we’re making it possible to request merch from us directly 🎉 Because of shipping deadlines, the request cut-off date is October 5, but that’s not where it stops! If you miss the deadline or simply want to produce your own merch locally (see below), we’ll reimburse you for those purchases.

We’ve updated last year’s reimbursement guidelines, which we also use throughout the year for regular community meetups. We will still cover most of the same things, such as venue fees and certain host expenses. However, if you request merch from us for Community Day you can expect:

• A T-shirt or sweater for each host (up to three)
• An ESPHome Starter Kit for each host (also up to three)
• A yet-to-be released sticker pack for your guests
• Tote bags
• Lanyards (a red design for guests who don’t want their photo taken or shared)

If you miss the deadline to request merch from us, or want to use a local provider to create custom merch we don’t offer, please email us at communityday@openhomefoundation.org so we can make sure you’re covered! We’ll share the official design assets for the items you want to order and reimburse you for your purchases.

It’s important to note that we cannot reimburse you for any purchases made through the official Open Home Foundation store. If you want official merchandise for your event this year, you need to submit your request before the deadline. However, we’ll absolutely cover you if you order some custom merch from another provider.

To put a bow on it

We know there’s a lot more information to digest for this year’s Community Day, so we want to make sure you, as a host, feel properly supported. The biggest change about this year’s event is that it truly is a team effort: I could not have put everything together without Florencia, and now we also have Isabelle and Inês supporting us through this annual event 😌

The #community-day channel in Discord is where you can chat with other hosts to share ideas for activities you’ll have at your meetups, and make threads to talk more closely with your own guests. I’ll hang out in there as well to answer any questions you may have, and keep hosts updated on the latest news.

If you don’t have Discord, or simply prefer email communications, we’ll happily provide the same support when you email us at communityday@openhomefoundation.org. I personally can't wait to hear from you, and look forward to seeing all the photos from this year’s celebration of the community 🤩

In December 2024, we launched the first Home Assistant survey to find out. Our goal was simple: to make Home Assistant more inclusive and approachable by listening directly to the diverse community of people who use it.

In the spirit of building in the open, today we’re thrilled to announce the anonymized results of that survey are now freely available. In this post, we’ll run you through what the survey covered, why and how we’re publishing this data, what the data is not (read: identifiable), how we’re using this information to improve what we do, and opportunities for further understanding and research.

TL;DR

• We ran our first Home Assistant community survey in December 2024, gathering 8,616 responses on how people set up and live with their smart homes.
• We have now published the anonymized results on Zenodo, after a strict anonymization process – including k-anonymity review, GDPR compliance, and cutting 12% of responses as a precaution.
• This data is already shaping our work, from redesigning “areas” in Home Assistant to tailoring the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 and informing our privacy research.
• The survey had limitations (it ran too long, and was English-only), which we’re addressing in future research.
• Explore the data yourself on Zenodo, or the full set of research questions and methodology on our GitHub page.

Explore the data on Zenodo

A snapshot of the survey

To give a little context, the survey ran for about seven weeks, closing in early February 2025, and gathered 8,616 submissions – offering meaningful insights into Home Assistant users and the day-to-day realities of running the platform. Most respondents said an interest in technology drove them to create a smart home, often prompted by moving into a new house, or a renovation. Only around a third started their smart home with Home Assistant itself, with the rest arriving from other platforms. Perhaps unsurprisingly, among those who chose Home Assistant, the most commonly selected reasons were local control (89.3%), its open source nature (84.0%), and powerful customization (81.7%).

Beyond how people got started, we wanted a fuller picture of who they are and how they live. The typical user in the study ran a substantial setup, managing anywhere between 11 and 200 devices, and most people (75%) did so in a home they owned, and often across two or more floors. Over half of the households surveyed had a resident cat or dog, and a quarter of respondents spoke more than one language at home.

We also asked about professional background and neurodivergence, since understanding the range of expertise and needs within the community shapes how we communicate and design: 78.3% of primary users worked or studied in technology or engineering, and 15.7% identified as neurodivergent, compared with 68.1% who identified as neurotypical, and 12.3% who were unsure.

These are just a handful of the interesting things we discovered via this work, and we’ll mention some others throughout this post. For the full details, you can find the complete list of research questions, methodology, and other supporting documents on our GitHub page.

Why publish the dataset?

Sharing the information we have to support open source smart home research is an obvious move. A rich dataset is a powerful tool, and one we believe everyone should have access to. Publishing the results supports other researchers by allowing them to build on our work, and means a greater diversity of thinking and creativity can be applied to the data. It also makes research more trustworthy as others can inspect the data behind the study instead of relying on conclusions, and progress is faster when researchers don’t have to re-collect the same data from scratch.

Part of our mission is to inform society about open source, ethical alternatives to Big Tech smart home devices. And one way we do that is by conducting research that generates knowledge, and sharing findings publicly so everyone can learn from them. In doing so we’re aligning our organization with the ethos of open science: the approach to scientific publication that believes all publicly useful research and its data should be openly available for all to check, build on, and benefit from – not locked behind journal paywalls. That’s why we’ve published on Zenodo, a trusted and widely used open research repository built and run by CERN, an international scientific organization and pioneer in open source, open access, and open data.

Just as we would in any formal research setting, we hold ourselves to this high standard, ensuring our methods and findings are rigorous, verifiable, reproducible, open, and fair.

Championing FAIR data

To be clear, making data technically available online isn’t the same as sharing it fairly. That’s why we follow the FAIR data framework – a widely used standard that ensures published data is:

• Findable: the dataset has a permanent link (a DOI) so it can always be located and cited.
• Accessible: anyone can download it, no gatekeeping.
• Interoperable: it’s in an open, standard format that any tool can read, with a codebook explaining every column.
• Reusable: it comes with clear documentation and an open license so others know how they’re allowed to use it.

FAIR data is what makes information genuinely useful to a researcher, instead of just visible. But before we get into how we’re using this data, let’s look at what the data isn’t, and what we did to ensure anything shared was in line with our principles.

Our publishing approach: Privacy first

As a foundation, we value privacy so much that it’s one of our three core principles. So it should come as no surprise that we followed a strict protocol to anonymize all data before publishing: no individual responses, no accounts, no identifiable people. Here’s a full rundown of all the actions we took to protect user privacy:

We removed any information that could point to a person

Names, technical identifiers, timestamps, free-text comments that could contain personal details, and sensitive information pertaining to health, disability, religion, or other household members (for example, partners and children) were all removed. In fact, we deleted so much identifying information that the shared dataset is no longer considered “personal data” under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - a key European privacy law.

We made sure no one stood out through k-anonymity review

Removing obvious identifiers isn’t enough. Sometimes a rare combination of ordinary details (such as a long-time user with an unusual setup) could make someone stand out. That’s why we used k-anonymity review – a data anonymization technique that checks whether enough people share the same combination of characteristics that no individual can be picked out from the group. We ran validated tests that looked for exactly this. Where needed, we grouped answers into broader categories: for example, describing someone as using “5–6 protocols” rather than listing their exact protocols. This ensured each respondent blended in with many others rather than being unique.

When in doubt, we cut the data

After all these steps, a small number of responses still had rare enough combinations that we couldn’t be fully confident they’d blend in. Rather than take any chances, we simply removed them from the dataset. In the end we left out about 12% of responses (roughly one in eight) purely as a precaution. We would rather publish less and be certain than risk the privacy of our users.

We checked it legally

Our approach was iteratively reviewed by our legal advisors, and every decision and step is recorded so it can be independently examined.

We published supplementary material

Along with the dataset, we released additional documentation so our actions can be followed, including:

1. Anonymization protocol and k-anonymity review.
2. README file documenting details about the survey and the dataset.
3. Anonymization and k-anonymity analysis scripts.
4. Full survey question list (although not every column on this list is included in the dataset due to privacy, the survey structure itself is valuable for other researchers).
5. Descriptive statistics, covering response distribution for every closed-ended question in the survey.

At every decision fork, we chose the more cautious option, and have intentionally made all our processes transparent. After all, the whole point of this survey is to learn with and from our community, and for us that doesn’t stop at the last question. Which brings us to what the data revealed, and how it’s already shaping our work.

Understanding social dynamics in the smart home

Our survey results showed that most people who responded live in a smart home with a partner or family. In that context, we learned that it’s typically one person – 94.4% of whom are men – who sets up and maintains the smart home, while their partners (87.4% of whom are women) and any children in the household interact with connected devices rather than through Home Assistant itself. In other words, one person tends to configure and maintain the system, while everyone else simply lives with it.

This survey data aligns with previous research on social dynamics in the smart home. For example, studies of multi-user smart homes have found that whoever installs the devices tends to end up with outsized control over how they’re selected, managed, and fixed. In some cases, this can lead to discomfort around privacy as a result – both from the technology itself, and from a sense of being observed by the person managing it (pointing to the potential for this kind of control to be misused), as studies by Christine Geeng and Franziska Roesner and Nils Ehrenberg and Turkka Keinonen have separately found.

Line Kryger Aagaard’s work has shown that the smart home experience is often gendered, too. Annika’s own research on cohabitation in smart homes explored this directly, looking at what happens when one person sets up and maintains the technology while the other lives with it, and finding power imbalances that require couples to negotiate control. It’s a dynamic we’re actively working to redesign for (for example, see ongoing UX design discussions on “Home Assistant for the whole household”), not just between partners but across all sorts of relationships in the home.

How we’re applying the data

The survey data has already helped deepen our understanding of the user experience, and how we optimize it. For example, information like the number of floors in a home, its size, and whether it is owned or rented informed design changes for “areas” in Home Assistant. Similarly, when our commercial partner Nabu Casa was developing what became the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2 to connect Zigbee and Thread devices, we provided them with insights from this survey so they could tailor the device to the needs and actual living conditions of our community.

On a broader level, the dataset helped us understand how the community relates to the foundation’s values of privacy, choice, and sustainability – which in turn helped shape how we interpreted data within our privacy research, and how we developed key organizational positions, such as that laid out in our Privacy position paper.

Likewise, learning about how current users arrive at Home Assistant – whether they start with it as their first platform or migrate to it from elsewhere – helps us understand the growth of the user base, and how the foundation can better support our community to advance our mission (keep an eye out for a detailed report on this soon).

Of course, as with any scientific research, the survey has limitations. It’s important to name them, both to be transparent and because they open opportunities for future improvements.

Limitations of the survey

The survey was too long. Many of you pointed this out to us, and despite having timed the survey at about 20 minutes during tests, we were clearly a bit off. According to Typeform (the survey platform we used), the average completion time was over 40 minutes! We appreciate anyone who started the survey, and are especially grateful for all who stuck with it until the end. Having such rigorous, engaged community members is a good problem to have. But it can also skew results, since only those with the time and interest to finish a long survey are represented. Because of that, and the fact the data doesn’t capture responses of those who dropped out of the survey – respondents represent a committed core of Home Assistant, not all users.

As some community members pointed out, the survey being only in English also limited its reach and possibly its accuracy. Numerous Home Assistant users that speak languages other than English weren’t represented, and where non-native English speakers did fill out the form, it’s possible that some questions may not have landed clearly.

Language barriers, biases, and blown-out survey times are all things that should be taken into account when interpreting the data. Research gaps are normal in academia – we mention them because we’re aware of where we can improve, and to set ourselves up for future research that’s as inclusive as possible. But there’s also an opportunity here… If you’re a researcher working on smart home technology in academia or industry, these gaps might be a useful starting point for your own work. If you’d like to discuss this research or explore future projects together, reach out to us via email or join the UX design or user research discussions on GitHub. We’d love to hear from you.

Future research

Many of you shared great ideas for additional survey questions, covering the status quo of smart homes, future plans, goals, and wishes, other ways of interacting with the community, and current friction points within Home Assistant.

The generous feedback on the content, framing, and even the styling of the survey from community members was greatly appreciated, and points to one of the tensions we ran into while designing this survey in the first place: there’s too much to cover! With so many interesting topics to explore, narrowing the questions down was a challenge, and a big part of why the survey ended up as long as it was.

But that’s also the beauty of user research: there’s always so much to learn! For that reason, we’re planning another community survey, so stay tuned!

Keeping the conversation going

At its core, this survey was about listening: replacing our guesswork with your facts and opinions, so we can build Home Assistant for those who actually live in a smart home, not just who we assume does. Publishing this dataset openly is another way of putting our principles into practice – letting anyone dig into what we’ve learned for the benefit of everyone.

None of this would exist without the thousands of you who took the time to answer, and stuck with a survey that ran longer than we intended. Thank you. Here’s to more open, honest conversations with the community that makes this all possible.

We’ve made some exciting changes this year, so read on for a sneak peek 👀

You asked, we listened

In May 2025, we held the first-ever Home Assistant Community Day. It was a labor of love of mine, and its success cannot be overstated. I published a blog about this milestone a month after the day was held, detailing our learnings from coordinating a worldwide event. One of the clearest takeaways was that organizers needed more lead time to plan and promote their local events – and that’s exactly why I’m publishing this blog today 😌

Packed rooms at last year’s event!

Same as last time round, this year’s event is being held on a Saturday, and we worked very hard to choose a date that would have the least impact on regional holidays. That said, a few things have also changed since last year, and we wanted to get you up to speed.

Come one, come all

You may notice a couple things are different this year. The most obvious one being that this is posted on the Open Home Foundation blog and not just the Home Assistant blog. If you’re wondering why, that’s because this year we decided we needed to include the communities from all of the foundation’s major projects and not focus so heavily on Home Assistant. So if you’re only interested in hosting an ESPHome or Music Assistant meetup for this year’s Community Day, you can now do so without feeling like it doesn’t belong on our calendar.

A palette for the people

The more subtle change this year is that I’ve asked our very talented graphic designers to update the event’s color palette to more broadly represent the Open Home Foundation. We decided to work with the same color palette we use across our websites for one of the foundation’s three core principles: sustainability. I chose this because the community ✨ sustains ✨ us at the foundation (yes, I think I am very funny 🤭).

Hosts: Hit send!

Since Luma has honored your contact preferences, we can’t rely on it to reach out to everyone who hosted a meetup for last year’s Community Day. So if that’s you, please contact us! We’ve created a Discord channel for you to post in and we want to make sure you have a role specific to your, well, role in meetups!

And on the subject of supporting hosts, there’s a lot that’s new this year to ensure your day runs smoothly. We’ll have a dedicated website that will update dynamically when new meetups are added to the Luma calendar, with updated reimbursement guidelines, a merch request form, and a Host Playbook for guidance on hosting your local meetup 👏

Let’s get specific… in September

In early September, we’ll have all the details ready for you, including opening up submissions on the Community Day Luma calendar, all the graphic assets, and the event’s website up and running for everyone to get started. Just let us get through IFA Berlin first 😅

The result? The EC listened to us and all the other organizations that contributed. On July 16, 2026, the European Commission adopted a decision under the DMA that requires Alphabet (Google’s parent company) to open up eleven Android features, including always-on wake word detection, ambient sensor access, and screen automation – to all assistants, on equal terms.

As an EU citizen, I’m genuinely pleased to see this kind of regulation of Big Tech leveling the digital market playing field and representing real progress for users. Not only that, but it’s a real win for the Open Home Foundation: we exist to fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability in smart homes, and this outcome shows what’s possible when we advocate for our community. We already briefly covered this news in our July newsletter, but I want to take some time now to break down how we got here, what this decision says, why it matters for our community, and what it could unlock for Home Assistant and the rest of the industry.

A bit of background

For three years, our community had tried to ship an always-on wake word detection in the Android Home Assistant Companion app. We wanted users to be able to say “Okay Nabu,” and have their self-hosted Assist voice assistant answer. Yet our early attempts kept breaking. Most notably, after each reboot the device's microphone no longer picked up the wake word. So we dug into the Android source code, and lo and behold, there was a solution: but Google wasn’t letting us use it.

Android has a well-designed mechanism that lets your device listen for “Hey Google” all day, without draining your battery. Their wake word detection runs in two stages. A small model does the first detection on a DSP (digital signal processor), which is a dedicated chip that processes audio using a fraction of the power your device’s main processor (CPU) would need. This first stage runs in an isolated process blocked from the network, and can’t extract audio until a potential wake word is detected. Then the second stage uses a stronger model via the CPU to confirm the detection.

Most contemporary devices have DSPs. But Android-based devices block access to it for anyone other than Google and the manufacturer of the device. Since the wake word mechanism using the DSP simply wasn’t available to third-party apps, and developer documentation didn’t exist publicly, we used what we could to build a workaround.

From microWakeWord to macro results

Our solution was running a small microWakeWord model on the device’s CPU inside our app. This worked, but came with some big downsides:

• Battery usage would jump from roughly 1% to 15% with wake word detection enabled, since the CPU is far less efficient for this task.
• The microphone privacy indicator (the green dot) would stay on permanently, because we needed full microphone access to run detection ourselves. We actually think the indicator is the right design – the problem is that we had no way to offer the stronger guarantee Google gives itself: an isolated process that can’t send audio anywhere. Instead, you had to trust that we were handling that access responsibly. And not because a safer version isn’t technically available. But because the DSP path is arbitrarily blocked by Google for anticompetitive reasons, forcing a less secure approach that introduces privacy risks for the user.
• You would have to set Home Assistant as your default assistant, because that was the only way Android would keep our service alive across reboots. That would lock you out of Gemini and everything tied to it (and you shouldn’t have to choose).

When I was invited to share these limitations (and others) with the Commission, I didn’t hold back. Which is why we were thrilled to discover an impressively precise and technically accurate decision from the EU: it correctly describes the two-stage wake word architecture, the DSP, the isolated process, and the role coupling. The report went down to details we only figured out by reading Android's source code ourselves. Which brings us to what the ruling actually says…

A wake-up call for Google

The decision requires Google to give third parties interoperability that’s “equally effective” as what Google’s own assistant gets across eleven Android features, free of charge. For wake word detection specifically, Google must provide:

• The ability to create a custom wake word model in Android, with first-stage detection run by the DSP (when available) instead of the app
• The ability to run a second-stage validation after the DSP has potentially identified the wake word in first-stage detection
• Testing tools and complete documentation, without requiring a commercial agreement with Google

Two lines deserve a special mention. First: Google “shall not subject access to features to the app holding a default role, including the default assistant role.” That is the decoupling we discussed with the Commission. Second: wake word detection “from multiple services, including services belonging to third parties and Alphabet, are able to run concurrently.” This would let you say “Okay Nabu” to control your home without changing any defaults or having to give up using Gemini for other purposes.

Beyond wake words, the decision covers invoking assistants from the long-press home gesture, access to ambient data like the microphone and camera under the same conditions as Google, structured integration with apps (including Gmail, Calendar, and Maps), system-level controls, access to on-device AI models, and fair background execution rules. Opening up these features hasn’t been without pushback – Google itself has raised security concerns, which we’ll get into below. But with all things considered, we believe the benefits to users and the industry far outweigh the risks.

Time’s ticking

Google must ship these changes in Android 18 (the next major release), by August 1, 2027. Concurrent hotword detection – letting multiple services be triggered by voice – must be in place by Android 19, no later than August 1, 2028.

It’s worth noting the decision still relies on Google to design and implement the changes, and with that comes a risk of malicious compliance: a technically sound solution that is unusable in reality (it wouldn’t be the first time a gatekeeper wrangled its way out of a regulation). But the fine print gives grounds for hope: Google must deliver solutions that are “equally effective” on ease of use, speed, and energy consumption, publish complete documentation and testing tools, and report progress to the Commission monthly. A real win for developers, and one that makes shipping the bare minimum much harder to get away with. With that in mind, here’s what it could look like for Home Assistant.

Help us make this change stick

We’re always working hard to create the best possible experience for our Android Home Assistant users, though we’re a small team – which is why community contributions to the Android app matter so much. If you’d like to help (in line with our recently released AI policy), we’d love to hear from you. While the ideas below are just that, and don’t form part of our roadmap, your input could help unlock them in the future:

Battery-efficient wake word detection

Like we mentioned earlier, moving first-stage detection from the CPU to the DSP should increase battery efficiency significantly. Our plan is to support two methods: on newer phones with Android 18, we’ll use the phone’s low-power chip to listen for the wake word. On older phones, or those without that chip, detection will keep running as it does today. Either way, we’ll show you which method your phone is using from within the Companion app.

One phone, two assistants

Today, choosing a third-party wake word means giving up Gemini, along with calls and messages through your default assistant. Default-role decoupling and concurrent wake word access would end that: You can talk to Gemini like aways, but also say “Okay Nabu” when you want to interact with your home via Home Assistant.

Imagine if you could set different wake words for different assistants inside the app itself, like “Hey Jarvis” for your admin dashboard and “Okay Nabu” for the family. This won’t even be technically possible until 2028 when Android 19 is released (and it will take a lot of work), but it’s a nice goal to have looking ahead.

Better built-in privacy

This is the part I find most exciting. The ruling requires wake word confirmation to run in a secure, isolated process (known as sandboxing) via the DSP. This means the part of the system that controls this feature is walled off, with no way to send audio anywhere until the wake word is confirmed. I don’t want to rely on trust when it comes to something as sensitive as interactions with my voice assistant. I want to be in control, with a clear explanation of what the things I enable actually imply. Sandboxing gives us that by design: privacy enforced by the OS itself, the same secure-by-default protection Google has always had, now finally available to all.

A more capable assistant, for everyone

Sensor access isn’t the only place this equal treatment applies. The decision also requires Google to open structured integrations with its own apps – Gmail, Calendar, Maps, etc – to qualified assistants, not just Gemini. In theory, that means your assistant could draft an email, manage a calendar event, or send a text and start a call on your behalf: exactly the capabilities our users tell us they miss when they leave Gemini, and ones that could genuinely boost usability, especially for users with accessibility needs.

That same access could expand the range of sensors and controls the app already reports to Home Assistant: sound detection (smoke alarm, breaking glass, doorbell) as automation triggers, and controls like do-not-disturb or Bluetooth your assistant can actually act on, not just observe.

On the security argument

Google has pushed back on the ruling, citing security risks. It warns the decision grants third parties “sensitive and powerful device permissions,” exposing user data “without user knowledge or consent.” This framing overstates the risks in a familiar tactic: sounding the alarm on security concerns to curtail attempts for interoperability. We’d point out, as one of those third parties, that the decision already builds in the safeguards that concern calls for: Google can still require user consent, show privacy indicators, and let users revoke access per service. For the most sensitive features like health data access, it also has a policy in place via the Play Store to check security, privacy, and data minimization before any app gets access.

And to be clear, these capabilities already exist on your phone, and Google’s own services already use them, without ever asking your approval. The risk didn’t appear when the EU asked for that access to be shared more broadly – what changed is who gets to decide who has it. Whatever risks remain, like those introduced by using any smart device, should be taken seriously – just not as a veil for Google’s double-dealing.

Our view is that trust without verification isn’t a security model, and limiting these safeguards to Google alone isn’t protection. Even major AI vendors have had security incidents, Hugging Face/OpenAI among them. What does offer protection is giving users choice and transparency into security processes, along with a secure technical architecture: sandboxing, isolation, revocable permissions – enforced equally, which is what this decision requires.

It’s worth watching where Google goes next: from 2027, its developer verification program will require every Android developer to be centrally verified before their apps can even be installed – a move contested by the Keep Android Open campaign, and one we’re also skeptical about. It’s a reminder that this fight isn’t over, and neither is our work.

There every step of the way

Google must report its implementation plans to the Commission within two months, and eligibility program terms are due for public consultation by February 2027. We’ll be there for it all: to test the betas, report on whether implementation lives up to the promise, and keep you informed. In the meantime, we’ll continue doing all we can to champion smart home tech that’s private, local, and controlled by you, on your terms.

Our position is clear: we reject tools that track individuals across the web to monetize their data. Instead, we want aggregated, anonymized analytics to show us how our websites are performing overall. This gives us the insights we need to effectively maintain the foundation’s websites without identifying who our visitors are, or compromising their privacy.

In this article we’ll explain how we plan to do this with Plausible analytics: open source software where you can see exactly what we see on a public dashboard and block altogether if you wish.

Please note: the following information only applies to Open Home Foundation websites, not Home Assistant software, your local instance, or any data from your home.

Aggregated, anonymized analytics

Plausible shows us aggregate totals of website activity, not individual behavior or personal information. Here’s what that looks like, with links to the relevant information in Plausible:

Giving you control

Our Plausible dashboard is public, so you can see exactly the same information as us – and we’ll provide the link at the bottom of every Open Home Foundation website using Plausible so everyone can access it. As part of our broader effort to align our websites with our principles, we’re also making sure any affiliate links and other tracking elements are removed.

The system doesn’t create persistent identifiers*, any other cross-site or cross-device tracking, or use cookies – which means no consent banners cluttering up your screen, and no way to recognize users across visits. However it also means that if you prefer not to be part of the aggregated statistics, you’ll need to block Plausible using your ad blocker rather than clicking a preference box. Many ad blockers already filter it automatically. If yours doesn’t, here’s how to add it:

||plausible.openhomefoundation.org/js/pa-*

If your ad blocker is blocking Plausible by default and you want to make an exception for our websites, you can use the following filter to enable it just for us:

@@||plausible.openhomefoundation.org/js/pa-*

*Plausible counts unique visitors using a 24-hour session hash.

How we’re using Plausible

We’ve chosen Plausible because its philosophy aligns with our own privacy principles, and we’re taking extra steps to customize it further. We’re hosting it on infrastructure we maintain in-house, which means we have full control over the anonymous, aggregated data and how it’s handled. We’ve turned off journey tracking features, and while Plausible uses IP addresses for geolocation, they are discarded and never stored.

Most analytics services collect personal data that privacy regulations – such as GDPR in Europe – require them to delete, typically after one to two years depending on jurisdiction. But since Plausible only provides fully anonymized data with no personally identifiable information, we can keep it indefinitely. This way we (and anyone viewing our public dashboard) can see how things change over time, and spot long-term trends that suggest what’s working and what needs improvement.

Why we need analytics

The Open Home Foundation is a non-profit responsible for fulfilling our mission: fighting for privacy, choice, and sustainability in smart homes. A key part of this is advocacy – making sure as many people as possible know about our work and the alternatives we’re building to Big Tech control. This means running multiple project and organizational websites, managing partnerships that fund our work, and allocating limited resources effectively.

As we’ve grown, we’ve reached a point where we have so many website visitors it’s impossible to ask them all basic operational questions about the websites we run, such as which browser versions to prioritize testing, whether our getting started guides are being found, or how to allocate maintenance effort across projects.

Without this information, we risk wasting resources on the wrong priorities.

Analytics helps us with:

• Technical optimization (browser compatibility, performance, maintenance)
• Resource allocation across projects
• Commercial sustainability (our store and links to our licensed products that help fund the foundation)
• Infrastructure and cost management

All these things inform our technical decisions, help us prioritize where to invest funds, and ensure we’re using our resources where they have the most impact.

For example: a key goal for 2026 is to make our projects more approachable for everyone – from experienced users to those just starting out. Using analytics will show us if beginners are finding our simplified guides or still getting lost in advanced documentation.

What we’ve been doing

Until now, the only data for our websites we could view was basic server-side usage information like page visit counts. This doesn’t sit well with us, since our users can’t see that data, or opt out of it unless they stop using our sites altogether! Which is why we’re moving to Plausible.

What happens next…

We’re implementing Plausible over the next few months. You’ll see the dashboard link appear at the bottom of pages as it goes live.

We’ve taken care to align this work with our values, but we want to hear from you: if something concerns you or you have suggestions for how we could do this better, let us know.

Back then, we said we wouldn’t hide behind closed doors until we’d polished some “perfect” final product, and we meant it. At the Open Home Foundation we build in the open. That means sharing our process, our progress, and every milestone along the way with the community that makes it all possible.

So today I’m excited to share the next milestone. The seeds we planted in February have started to sprout: thanks to the incredible response from thousands of users who opted to share anonymized device data during the initial phase, the preview edition of the database’s public interface is now live!

What is the preview edition?

Providing a public, open way to browse the anonymous, aggregated device data we collect was always part of the plan, and this preview is our first step toward it.

You can already use it to search and filter devices to see aggregated community insights, starting with a deliberately focused set of specifics, such as whether a device requires an internet connection, and which protocols and integrations it works with. We’ve kept that initial scope narrow on purpose, giving us a solid foundation we can build on together with you, our community, as the database grows.

What you see today is only a slice of what’s to come, and we want to be upfront about that. Yes it’s functional, but it’s unpolished. There are no final design flourishes, and we’re sure there are a few bugs waiting to be discovered. We don’t even have an official name for it… yet. But we’d rather you experience it now than wait for the full picture before opening the doors.

So please, jump right in.

Help us test it

This is a resource built by the community, for the community, so we want you to start using it now. The more you explore it today, the more powerful we can make the official launch later this year.

It’s the baseline everything else builds on, where you can browse, search, and read device data, and it’s the groundwork for the richer pages and community contributions still to come.

As you explore the preview, we’d love your help tracking down areas where we can improve. We’ve set up a dedicated feedback channel on Discord, and that’s the best place to share your thoughts so everything lands in one spot. A few things we’re especially keen to hear about:

• What’s missing for you: Which device details would help you make a decision, and what extra features or information would make the database more valuable to you?
• Interface usability: How easy is it to navigate, search, and make sense of device information, and did you hit any hurdles or confusing moments along the way?

Big reactions or small ideas, what you’d keep or what you’d change: all of it helps. Head over to the discussion and let us know what you think.

A couple of things you might notice along the way:

Can’t find a specific device? To ensure data quality and accuracy, devices only appear in search results once enough independent submissions have been aggregated and validated. Additionally, during this early phase, custom integrations and service-type devices are not yet included.

Want to edit or add device details directly? Direct contributions to device pages, like adding context or correcting details, are firmly on our roadmap but a little further down the line. Right now the focus is simply making the data collected so far accessible and useful to everyone.

So for now, take it for a spin and let us know what you think. Like I said back in February, this is a marathon, not a sprint, and your feedback will directly shape the final product!

Explore the preview

Share your feedback

This marks a milestone for the Open Home Foundation, and one we can’t wait to share with you (and the trade show’s 220,000 visitors!). We’ll provide more information as the event nears, but in the meantime, here’s what you need to know…

A first for the foundation

Making our IFA Berlin exhibitor debut is a huge opportunity to showcase what’s possible when privacy, choice, and sustainability are at the heart of smart home tech.

More than that, it’s a chance to connect with our community and industry partners on the ground, celebrate our projects, and show the world what an open, privacy-first, locally controlled smart home can look like in practice.

With the event’s Smart Home Hall drawing an estimated 40,000 visitors, we’re excited to spread the word about all things open source in the smart home.

Come on in, the door’s open

Our booth won’t be a standard trade show stand. That’s because we’re not a standard tech organization. Unlike our corporate counterparts, we’re not coming to IFA to sell you a product: we’re coming to connect – not only with our existing community, but with anyone curious about what the Open Home can be.

Amid the hustle and bustle of the trade show floor, our booth is designed as a sanctuary. A place for meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas where you can feel at ease, and hopefully inspired!

Anyone can come by and speak to staff members, commercial partners, and community volunteers. Whether you’re there for a casual chat, to check out some demos and devices, or simply to say hello: at IFA Berlin, our home is your home. We can’t wait to welcome you in 🏡

Join our Community Meetup

And the fun continues off the show floor… On Sunday, September 6, at 7:00 pm, we’re gathering at Enjoy Rooftop, and everyone’s invited! If you’re attending IFA or happen to be in the neighborhood, come along for some good conversation, light snacks, and your first two drinks on us!

I’ll be there along with a group of Open Home Foundation staff, our commercial partners Apollo Automation and Nabu Casa, and other awesome community members who keep our projects running. Head to the Luma event page to register and for more details.

See you in Berlin!

We’ll be sharing more about what to expect at the booth as we get closer to September, but in the meantime, tickets to IFA Berlin 2026 are on sale now. You’ll find us at stand 153 in the Smart Home Hall (Hall 1.2). We can’t wait to see you there! 👀

That’s why recent releases of Home Assistant and ESPHome focus on helping you bridge the gap between older, offline protocols and the modern smart home. This makes it possible for you to pull almost any device into your setup – yes, even that 20-year-old receiver, or basement air conditioner with yellowing plastic remote!

What we’ve built

If you missed this in the Home Assistant release notes, here’s a summary. We’ve expanded the capabilities of ESPHome – the software that powers many of our DIY hardware projects – to support generic proxying. This allows Home Assistant to use small, inexpensive microcontrollers as physical bridges for:

• Infrared (IR)
• Radio Frequency (RF)
• Serial Communication (RS232/UART)

These join our existing Bluetooth and Z-Wave proxies to ensure that no matter what language your device speaks, you can reach it over your home network.

How a proxy works

I like to think of a proxy as a communication bridge. When acting as a proxy, a device handles a certain type of communication for Home Assistant. We already have Bluetooth proxies, which are ESPHome-powered devices that speak Bluetooth for Home Assistant. The proxy itself doesn’t need to know the specific commands for your television or air conditioner, it simply speaks its language – whether that’s Bluetooth, a pulse of infrared light, a radio frequency, or a serial connection. It’s Home Assistant that tells the proxy what commands to send and when.

What’s awesome about this approach is that it separates the signal from the logic. The proxy does the hard work of physically sending the message, while Home Assistant tackles the brain work 🧠. This separation also means the proxy doesn’t have to live on or near your Home Assistant server to be able to “talk” to it: you can place them wherever it makes sense for your home, and the devices you want to control.

And as our community creates more integrations, you can use your single infrared-emitting ESPHome device for other TV brands, that old AC in your basement, or anything else you choose.

The result is that instead of shelling out to replace that perfectly functional AC with a new smart model, you can now use a proxy to build intelligence yourself. It’s about giving your existing gear the modern features it was missing.

Freedom from cables…

We’ve also tackled serial, a technology that has been a reliable standard for more than 60 years. It’s in more devices than you might imagine – from solar inverters and high-end audio receivers to industrial gear – but it had a pretty big downside: it needed to be plugged directly into your Home Assistant server via a cable 😕.

Our new serial proxy changes that. Home Assistant now establishes a wireless, encrypted connection to an ESPHome proxy, allowing you to cut the cord and control your serial devices from anywhere in the home. We are already seeing this in action, with the most recent releases of Home Assistant adding native support for Denon receivers and LG TVs, both over RS232 serial connections.

The joy of giving (and receiving)

We’re giving radio frequency the same treatment. With an RF-capable ESPHome proxy, Home Assistant can now reach devices that broadcast over the air: Honeywell string lights, for example.

And if all that wasn’t enough, Home Assistant 2026.6 can now receive IR, not just send it, which basically means an old IR remote can be used as an input for just about anything in Home Assistant!

The bigger picture

By consolidating all your devices into a single platform, Home Assistant gives you complete freedom to use your data however you see fit. You can build custom dashboards, create complex automations, sync with other interfaces like Google Home (if you really want to!), or even give control to your local AI agent.

But what I’m really excited about is how this freedom fuels our vision of a more sustainable smart home. This isn’t an accident: making IR, RF and serial “first-class citizens” of Home Assistant are specific goals on our public roadmap, all tied to the same Open Home Foundation principle: sustainability.

As How-To Geek recently put it, the sheer pace of our new integrations means the best way to upgrade your smart home today is actually to stop buying new devices, because the high-quality gear you already own probably works with Home Assistant now.

The proxying capabilities we’re building give you a real, viable alternative to the mainstream “disposable” smart home. When you choose to reuse and repurpose the hardware you already own, you aren’t just saving money – you’re proving your home can be sustainable as well as smart.

Bring your old gear back to life

To get started, you need ESPHome-powered proxies. There is no official hardware that does this (yet!), so you’ll need to make your own. This isn’t as daunting as it might sound since we’ve created ready-made projects: simply get the linked device, install the software via your browser, and you’re good to go.

Help us expand the ecosystem

While the infrastructure is ready to use today, to really break free from the disposable smart home we need to expand the library of older devices that Home Assistant can talk to natively.

If you’re a developer, we need your help building out new integrations that take advantage of these connections. Check out our development guides for Bluetooth, infrared integrations, radio frequency, and serial integrations to get involved!

As part of our commitment to building in the open, this week we're proud to publish the foundation's very first Annual Report for 2025 🎉 From structural changes to big new projects, the report gives a detailed look into who we are and how we operate, along with our wins of 2025 and our plans for what's next. Read on for a snapshot of what you'll find…

Read the 2025 Annual Report

A mission driving it all

As the main alternative to Big Tech in the smart home space, transparency is central to how we operate. We launched our efforts to build in the open this year – a commitment to co-develop our projects with the larger community, from pre-planning to production – and publishing our 2025 Annual Report is another way of walking the talk.

In a smart home landscape rife with walled gardens, digital surveillance, and a profit-over-people culture – championing local, open source tech that makes your smart home really yours is more important than ever.

Our Annual Report highlights our goals and growth, the real challenges we've worked through, and the areas in which we're committed to improving. Part of what makes us different is that we're not a big corporation. We're a group of passionate humans committed to safeguarding the future of the Open Home. This report is proof of the work – and there's a lot more where that came from!

Laying new foundations

Our restructuring wasn't just a legal formality – it was a chance to rebuild the way we work from the ground up. We overhauled our internal governance to create a clearer separation between our Board, Leadership Committee, and Back Office, and took steps to reduce the risk and perception of conflicts of interest.

This change enabled the Open Home Foundation to invest in salaried staff, whose purpose is to support our community and the day-to-day operations that keep our open source projects sustainable. In turn, our volunteer community has space to focus on what they do best: making creative contributions that keep the smart home open for all.

With a new structure and rapidly growing teams, it's more important than ever that our work lives up to our values. That's why we established a semi-independent Policy & Principles Working Group. It exists to explore and articulate what we believe in, act as a champion for our ideals internally and externally, and help keep us focused on our founding principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability.

Along with welcoming a second commercial partner, Apollo Automation, and launching a new fundraising initiative – we have greatly improved the stability and long-term viability of our work. And that lets us focus, like never before, on our community.

A milestone and a high point

Reaching over two million active Home Assistant installations worldwide in 2025, quite honestly, blew us away. That number represents a 28% increase from the previous year, meaning more smart homes than ever are running on technology that respects privacy and choice.

The spirit of building together was on full display at our first ever Open Home Foundation Summit in Dublin. We gathered salaried staff, community members, and top contributors for three days to connect and collaborate. The energy was electric, and we ended up hacking together our new open audio standard, Sendspin, in the hotel lobby!

Around the world in 82 ways

Turns out, great things happen when we come together in person. And our 2025 Community Day events really drove this home. We had 1,600 community members gather across 82 in-person events around the globe to connect, exchange ideas, and share their love of open source smart home projects.

All of which was organized by our incredible volunteers who continue to give their own time to work on something they believe in 💪 Their contributions are why formalizing our relationship with volunteers became a priority for 2026, but that's not all…

Investing in community

The community is the heart of our work, and in 2025 we took concrete steps to reflect that. We set the plans in motion to launch our new Community department – creating a proper home within the foundation for the people who make it what it is 🎉 We also introduced our Community Sync meetings, creating an open forum for developers, contributors, and smart home users to provide input into the planning of major projects.

In 2025, we found more ways to meet face-to-face than ever before, and we're already planning what's next. Connecting with users, volunteer developers, and everyone passionate about the open smart home matters deeply to us; not just to meet you, but to create opportunities for you to shape your home on your own terms. We can't wait to see more of you soon.

So much more to report

Last year was a year of change – and we've only scratched the surface in this blog. The report reveals the bigger picture: the governance changes, the community programs, the challenges we struggled to finally overcome, and our ambitions for 2026. Dive into the 2025 Annual Report for all the details, and see what's possible when we rally around a shared mission.

So to help bring the fun, versatility and practicality of e-paper to a wider audience, we're teaming up with our new collaboration partner: OpenDisplay!

Unlocking the potential of e-paper

Because e-paper displays look so impressive, it's easy to assume they're difficult to set up. In some ways, that's been true – with such screens often being locked into proprietary cloud systems or requiring complex code just to update an image.

OpenDisplay has solved this by creating an open source protocol – a standard language in other words – for e-paper displays. They've also established a reference implementation, so any manufacturer can use it to ensure their e-paper displays work with Home Assistant (or any other smart home setup) straight out of the box. The result is it's now easier than ever to build low-power smart home displays that don't look like glaring screens. 😎

All sorts of projects are possible with e-paper displays!

The power of Bluetooth proxies

For our community, this is where the fun starts. OpenDisplay can piggyback on the Bluetooth proxies you likely already have around your home – such as an ESP32 running ESPHome. It uses that existing network to send any image you want, be it an illustration, weather dashboard, or calendar overview, straight to your e-paper displays. You're essentially using the infrastructure you've already built to keep everything local and fast, without ever needing the cloud.

Why we're keen to collaborate

We've always believed the Open Home is much bigger than any single project. The real magic happens when independent developers and communities unite to do great things together. Whether it's WLED, Zigbee2MQTT, or now OpenDisplay, we love teaming up with people who are building the right tools for the right reasons. By supporting OpenDisplay, we're not just backing a great piece of software, we're helping ensure it remains a flourishing shared resource for everyone to use and enjoy 😃.

And of course, they also align with our core principles:

• Privacy: Your data stays on your local network, never leaving your home.
• Choice: You aren't locked into a specific manufacturer's app or a cloud service that might disappear tomorrow.
• Sustainability: Low-power e-paper displays can run for months on a single battery and remain useful for many years to come.

We can't wait to see where this partnership takes us. Seeed Studio is already on board with reference hardware to get you started, and we're excited to see how the community expands on that. E-paper opens up so many avenues to explore: from dynamic artwork displays to simple, low-distraction dashboards that blend into your decor. Ready to dive in? Check out the OpenDisplay documentation to find out what's supported and how to get your first e-paper display up and running!

It was a milestone we'd been working toward for a long time. By publishing and presenting this research, we're putting evidence on the academic record that privacy-conscious users exist, and their needs are real and underserved. It reinforces one of our core beliefs: that smart homes need to be designed with privacy at the foundation, rather than something users have to retrofit.

But the paper is only part of the story. Behind it is a rigorous approach to research that shapes our work at the Open Home Foundation. In this post, we'll dig into our methods, what we're currently investigating, and why we think research and community go hand in hand.

From principles to a peer-reviewed paper

Privacy is one of the core principles of the Open Home Foundation. So when the opportunity arose to explore the topic in a formal study, it felt like a meaningful place to start. Building a Private Smart Home: User Motivations and Challenges – the paper Annika and Open Home Foundation President Paulus Schoutsen co-authored – investigated how privacy shapes the way users set up and maintain their smart homes. Specifically, what measures they take to ensure privacy in their homes, and what aspects of smart home tech make users uncomfortable due to privacy concerns, including when that might lead to them abandoning certain (big) technologies.

What the research illuminated was that privacy concerns in the smart home don't exist in a vacuum. Users are responding to a broader landscape, rife with data breaches, surveillance capitalism, AI trained on personal data, and data tracking for political gain. The desire for more private systems is real, and for many, it's already driving them away from technologies that don't meet that standard. That's exactly why we exist as a foundation: to fight for locally controlled, private smart home alternatives that put users back in control.

Presenting that work at ACM CHI meant bringing it to an event of more than 6,000 people: researchers, manufacturers, academics, and community members who care just as deeply about the future of smart home technology as we do, including many fellow Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers – the field in which we both completed our PhDs. HCI is a discipline concerned with designing technology around human behavior, needs, and values: exactly the lens we bring to our work at the Open Home Foundation. We had rich conversations with people working across domains that feed directly into ours: privacy within IoT systems, bystander privacy for visitors and guests, prevention of technology-enabled violence in smart homes, family-centric smart home design, and more. That exchange of ideas – across disciplines, perspectives, and areas of expertise – is what these conferences are all about. And it doesn't stop in Barcelona.

Scenes from ACM CHI 2026 – from keynotes to the conference floor.

Whether you're a researcher, a community member, or just someone who cares about privacy in your smart home – we'd love to hear from you. Head to our UX design discussions page on GitHub to share your insights (we read everything!). And if you'd like to go deeper into the research itself, check out the full paper and research wiki, or if you only have a few minutes, take a peek at the poster we presented at the conference 👀

Why we question what we build

Research is one of the ways we ensure what we build solves a problem for the people who will actually use it. By making decisions that are informed by evidence instead of instinct, we not only reduce risk, but keep ourselves accountable to the people we're building for. Which brings us to a larger goal that's at the heart of everything we do: making sure what we create is genuinely human centered, not just technology centered (spoiler: it's harder than it sounds).

It's an iterative process that involves figuring out the right questions to ask, speaking to a broad range of people, and being honest about our biases and gaps in understanding. For example, being aware that our community doesn't represent our entire user base. The people who are active and vocal in our forums and discussions are invaluable, but they're also a small share of our users and we can't generalize their needs and opinions to everyone. That's why good research makes sure those other voices are heard, too. Because by getting a fuller picture of who users are and what matters to them, we're better placed to find real problems that smart home technology can solve.

Ultimately, every question leads back to you. But who's doing the asking?

Meet the people behind the work

Our work spans two interconnected areas: understanding the smart home landscape and the people within it.

Idil's focus as a Market Researcher in the Marketing department is how the smart home landscape is shifting, how people outside our community perceive and relate to our projects, and how we can better identify and serve the needs of the people already with us. With a background in cognitive neuroscience and doctoral research in healthcare technology, Idil has a particular interest in the growing convergence of home technology and personalized health, and what that means for how we design for people, not just devices.

Annika works within the Product & UX department to understand what users actually want and need: who a new feature is for, what needs it addresses, and what aspects of the user experience need attention before it ships. Annika's PhD focused on cohabitation in smart homes – specifically what happens when one person sets up and maintains the technology, while the other person lives with it. The research investigated the dynamics of shared households, including the power imbalances that can emerge, and how couples negotiate control.

Annika Schulz (left) and Idil Bostan presenting Open Home Foundation's privacy study poster at ACM CHI 2026 in Barcelona.

What unites our work is a shared belief that technology should be designed to be approachable to everyone. Our Product Manager Laura Palombi captured this perfectly at State of the Open Home 2026: "Approachability means thinking as a human is thinking and not as the machine wants you to think".

The question is how we actually understand what our users think, especially when our commitment to privacy rules out the research methods most tech companies take for granted.

Built on consent, not cookies

Let's address the elephant in the room: data. Research at the Open Home Foundation is shaped by a core tension: we want our projects to be grounded in evidence, but we won't sacrifice our values to get there.

This pushes us to seek privacy-sensitive data collection methods for understanding our users and informing decisions. We're crafting approaches designed to respect the community. For example, when conducting research, participants are explicitly asked to share information about themselves, their perspectives, opinions, and experiences based on informed consent – as described in our User Research Agreement. Translation: we want people to share on their own terms, and know their privacy is protected in the process.

While our approach can add challenges, meaningfully contributing to ethical research methods in service of our community, especially in the world of tech, is more than worth the effort.

Research in action

And it's this commitment to ethical research that has shaped our work from the start. Our research on the automation editor – a tool that lets you create and edit automations directly from the Home Assistant user interface, without writing any YAML code – explored how users actually interact with one of Home Assistant's most-used features. And our research into how privacy-conscious users build and maintain their smart homes evolved into the study we presented at CHI.

That work doesn't stop. Right now, we're investigating user expectations of the Works with Home Assistant (WWHA) badge. Because some WWHA-certified devices have features missing in Home Assistant, we want to understand what users expect from the badge so we can align our certification decisions with that. This will also help us work out how to communicate any limitations so users can make genuinely informed purchasing decisions.

We're also conducting several studies in parallel, in which we ask questions about the work and field of professional smart home installers, learn from beginners about how we can help them find their footing in ESPHome, and observe how users familiarize themselves with the Dashboard Creator of Home Assistant.

All different questions, all driven by the same commitment: to make sure your input shapes what we build. And we want more people to be part of the discussion.

Join the conversation

From our work in Human-Computer Interaction, we know Home Assistant has already become a research tool in its own right, used across domains as a flexible way to build prototypes and integrate newly developed technologies into real setups (it's actually how Annika found her way to Home Assistant in the first place!). That crossover between practice and academia matters to us. Outside perspectives challenge us to think beyond what already exists, and that ultimately means more thoughtful technology and more choice for you – which is exactly why we want to stay connected to the people doing that work.

The wider community we're proud to be part of – CHI '26's academia-practice divide meetup.

If you're a researcher working on smart home usage, interaction design, privacy, accessibility, or anything adjacent, we'd love to hear from you. We've set up a dedicated space on GitHub where you can share your work and start discussions: a place to exchange ideas, follow each other's work, and think together about what comes next.

The best version of smart home technology gets built when practitioners and researchers are in dialogue. Come be part of it!

So what better way to start than by sharing our vision from State of the Open Home 2026!

This big annual event is where we celebrate our community, share successes, and get excited about what's coming next: and this year it was extra special. But don't just take my word for it! Check it out for yourself on our full recording of the livestream.

The heart of the Open Home

If you can sense the energy and excitement in the video, I can assure you it was even more intense standing on that stage in Utrecht! Seeing almost 300 of you in person – with thousands more joining us online – was a powerful reminder of how far we've come together.

The theme of State of the Open Home 2026 was "Building in the open". That's more than just a slogan: it's your invitation to help us ensure the future of smart homes is shaped by the people who actually use them.

Kicking off the event, from packed halls to the main stage.

Investing in people

But building in the open only works if we have the resources to support everyone involved. That's why the first thing we shared this year wasn't a feature reveal or secret product (we're not Apple!). It was the introduction of our new Community department, and its lead Melissa Thermidor! 🎉

From left to right: Melissa Thermidor, Missy Quarry, and Florencia Martin – our new Community department!

Melissa's arrival shows we're putting our money where our mouth is. She brings a fresh perspective to the foundation, and a renewed focus on making sure everyone who finds their way to our community feels genuinely welcome. With our Event Organizer, Florencia Martin, and Community Manager, Missy Quarry, this new department is set up to move beyond maintaining the community to actively growing it. This means better support for contributors and volunteers, more resources for local meetups, and deeper connections with people building in the open all over the world.

"Community is no longer something that just happens around the edges – we're building something really big and really profound. This is the real deal." – Melissa Thermidor, Lead of Community, Open Home Foundation

How we're building in the open

So what does building in the open actually look like? It isn't always easy, that's for sure, and takes a level of vulnerability and coordination that closed-door companies rarely have to face. But the results speak for themselves.

The event explores three examples of how this approach is taking shape, and what it means for you:

• With Home Assistant Labs: How we're inviting you to break, test, and influence our ideas while they're still being forged. You give us real-world feedback, and we evolve the design in the open.
• With Sendspin: How we're giving you the chance to contribute to features long before they're officially "finished", by opening up new protocols like Sendspin while they're still evolving (with some pretty cool music demos thrown in for good measure 🎶).
• With our partners: How we're making it easier to find hardware you can actually trust. From Apollo's ESPHome Starter Kit, to Nabu Casa's new products with infrared (IR) and radio frequency (RF) 👀, it's all about giving you more choice.

These examples are only the beginning. The goal this year is making everything more approachable, and as we say on stage: "Approachability means showing all the context".

We want to open the doors even wider so you can see and contribute to what comes next. That means moving away from the "black box" of development and towards a model where every major milestone is a shared journey. And that starts with being clear about where we're headed.

Franck (Lead of Home Assistant) and JLo (Lead of Product & UX) sharing what it means to build in the open.

Be part of what we build next

That's why the final part of the event sees Laura and Matthias from our Product & UX department join Franck and JLo on stage to talk about our roadmap, which is now public on GitHub!

As the team explains, what makes this roadmap different is that it's a living thing for you to participate in, not just view. We want to know what's missing and what you want to see next. Head to the roadmap, open the cards (demonstrated by Laura in the livestream), and tell us what you think. Because it's your insights and expertise that will help us build what's next.

Want to propose something that's not on the roadmap yet? Submit it on our Home Assistant, Music Assistant, or ESPHome feature requests pages. We read every single one, and selected features are translated into roadmap opportunities by the team.

From left to right: Franck, JLo, Matthias, and Laura chatting through the new roadmap.

Your voice matters

Crucially, this process isn't just for developers. Whether you're an established user or just getting started, your voice matters. Your experience in your own home is the most valuable resource we have… and you don't need to write a single line of code to help steer our direction.

That's because one of our biggest priorities is making Open Home Foundation projects – Home Assistant, Music Assistant, and even ESPHome – more approachable for anyone. We're reducing the barriers to entry, without removing any of the power established users expect. Or as Franck put it onstage: "We really want to lower the floor without lowering the ceiling".

Finally, thank you!

Setting goals like this is only possible because of the community behind us. The energy we felt in Utrecht – and from everyone watching online – is an amazing reminder of what happens when we actually get together to share our ideas and experiences.

From the atmosphere onstage to the buzz of conversation and laughter at the food stands, there was a feeling at the event that no livestream can quite capture: being there in person was genuinely something special. If you couldn't make it this year, stay tuned – you won't want to miss the next one!

When the talks wrapped, the conversations kept going: drinks, demos, and all.

I'm so incredibly grateful that you're here building this with us: it's your passion, persistence (and, yes, patience!) that make all our work possible. On that note, I also want to give a huge thanks to all our State of the Open Home 2026 speakers and wonderful event staff who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring this production to life. It's been a blast.

For everyone who tuned in online, we'd love to hear your thoughts on how the event went. If you have a spare moment, take our (anonymous) online attendee survey and share your feedback and suggestions.

We couldn't do any of this without you. Let's keep building… and see you next year!

And that's a wrap!

Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming, and so many more—to the Open Home Foundation. This is all about looking into the future. We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open source projects becoming abandonware. To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes.

But the work of the Open Home Foundation doesn't stop there. Through close partnership with Nabu Casa, the foundation funds, directs resources to, and collaborates on the development of critical external projects like Z-Wave JS, WLED, Rhasspy, and Zigbee2MQTT. Our main requirements are that the projects remain open to everyone, and aligned with our core principles.

This is what we've already done.

Our ambitions go further

Our aim is to have the resources to be an active political advocate. Serving to educate the public, public servants, and the companies making smart home devices and services, about the importance of open standards, open source projects, and privacy, choice, and sustainability when it comes to the future of smart homes.

Here's how we understand these principles:

Privacy

Privacy means you control your data. Nobody, and no company or organization, has a right to know what you do in your home, with whom you meet or associate, or how you choose to live—without your explicit permission. You should only share this information if you freely make the choice to do so without external pressure. That's why your devices need to work locally. It's OK for a product to offer a cloud connection—but its main functionality should work without the cloud. And the use of cloud services should always be opt-in and clearly described.

You should never have to worry about being yourself to avoid being tracked or classified by an algorithm. You should be able to live your life—because nobody is watching.

Choice

Choice means you have the freedom to use any device, with any other, from any manufacturers, any way you like—for as long as you want. To make this possible, vendors must not arbitrarily limit the interoperability of their devices with the rest of your smart home. Control of those devices, and management of data they gather, should operate via open standards and local APIs.

You should be able to design your personal smart home—the way you imagine it.

Sustainability

Sustainability means being able to use and repurpose old appliances, smart devices, and other durable hardware beyond commercially-limited lifetimes as your smart home evolves. But it also means having the tools to limit your environmental impact by tracking, automating, and reducing waste and emissions.

You should be able to embrace the convenience of a smart home without compromising your ability to cut utility bills—and your carbon footprint.

Getting here didn't follow a linear path

As many people in this community already know, the Home Assistant Journey started over 10 years ago when Paulus Schoutsen wrote a few lines of Python to take control of his Philips Hue smart lights. His motivation was greater control over the devices he'd purchased—rather than letting a corporate giant decide what was best for his home.

This act struck such a chord that over the coming years, thousands of mostly volunteer contributors transformed that first script into a leading smart home platform. They also built an entire ecosystem of projects around it.

But two other critical trends also took place, one far more troubling: The smart home landscape grew dominated by companies whose purpose was to sell you new devices on a schedule to please their shareholders—while siphoning off your personal data for financial gain.

The other trend was Schoutsen and others approaching burn-out as they tried to keep their various projects thriving—doing most of their coding after coming home from their real jobs, on weekends, and when bugs needed squashing.

To address this, Schoutsen, Ben Bangert, and Pascal Vizeli founded Nabu Casa in 2018 as a for-profit company. The goal was to stabilize Home Assistant, and bolster its longevity, by injecting predictable funding for future development. Nabu Casa also bought ESPHome, with the same purpose in mind.

Early on, some people questioned whether starting a for-profit company was an altruistic move. But over the following years, Nabu Casa established a clear and accountable track record. This included practicing what it preached: Speaking up to protect open source ideals when other developers came under threat; directing full-time employees to devote their days to open source, community-driven, smart home projects; and joining organizations like the Connectivity Standards Alliance and Z-Wave Alliance, and the general fight for critical open standards like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter.

By 2021, Schoutsen and others defined a concept called the open home, built around the principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability. But Home Assistant and other open home projects were still floating in a kind of undefined space between a for-profit entity and an open source repository on Github.

So in 2023, this core group of smart home developers decided to codify and protect their ideals. And to create a formal home for the projects they and so many other contributors had poured their souls, beliefs, and shared code into.

Individual efforts needed to be united. And in 2024, the Open Home Foundation was created to unite them—with a special, rules-bound, inaugural partner in Nabu Casa to provide the majority of the funding.

Going forward will be a journey

Share your ideas. Speak up. Contribute. Subscribe. Support. Tell us where we can do better. Champion our cause.

We see this as a living project, in fitting with the mosaic threads of DNA that represent our past.

We've always stood for open source, creativity, and taking initiative. And we have no doubt that this organization will evolve over the years. We will remain true to our principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for the smart home. And always open to finding the best way to achieve our goals.

We hope you'll join us.