Feb 27, 2025 9 min read

The independent platform that serves you

Welcome to the February edition of the Open Home Foundation newsletter, the place to learn about the latest and greatest things for your smart home that improve its privacy, choice, and sustainability.

The Open Home newsletter is written by Paulus Schoutsen - President of the Open Home Foundation, and founder of Home Assistant. Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here!

Some months feel like a year with how fast things are changing. Fortunately, the Open Home is built to weather these turbulent times. This month, we’re looking at how the shifting whims of big tech and government put your smart home at risk—and why an independent platform is more crucial than ever. We also cover our recent donations to important open source projects, an exciting new Works with Home Assistant partner, new voice features, better backups, and a trip to the latest Z-Wave summit.

Finding stability through privacy

The majority of smart home users are on a platform created by big tech. These platforms all work in pretty much the same way—they send your data to their big tech clouds. As a user, you have little control over your data and are locked into their ecosystem of apps and hardware. Once your data is out of your hands, you must trust these corporations with intimate details about your most private space: your home.

They are called big tech because their technology touches nearly every aspect of society. Their choices impact almost every person in every country in the world. And guess what? These corporations—obsessed with collecting, owning, and controlling all data—aren’t likely to risk their market dominance for anything. If forced to choose between protecting your data or maintaining their lead, you can probably guess which way they’ll go.

With the new US government getting into power, we've seen a disturbing trend: big tech is bending the knee. They are quickly falling in line, and all without much of a fight. On January 7, Meta decided to end its war on disinformation in a bid to improve relations with key people in government. On January 10, Amazon announced that they are "winding down outdated programs and materials" related to its efforts around representation and inclusion. Google took similar steps on February 5, all to avoid risking the company’s status as a federal contractor following “court decisions and US Executive Orders on this topic”. This isn’t out of any ideological alignment; it’s all about doing what’s best for their bottom line.

This isn’t limited to just the US. The UK wanted Apple to add a backdoor to your encrypted data. To avoid doing that, Apple decided to always store the encryption key alongside the data in the UK by disabling their "Advanced Data Protection". This effectively gives the government your data on request. The companies that provide many people with their smart home platforms have shown they will change their stance on nearly anything with just the smallest amount of government pressure.

There is a very easy way to remove all these trust issues and risks of your home’s data being misused by these companies or the government. Remove the cloud from the equation, and keep data in the home. Now, there’s nothing to decrypt, review, or govern. Simplicity and stability through privacy.

Smart homes require stability; the technology is in your walls or built into your appliances. If you rely on the cloud, you risk being compromised every time a government changes its mind. Leaving you dismantling your home just to retain your privacy.

When I started the Open Home Foundation and donated Home Assistant to it, my intention was this would be a gift to everyone: a gift of stability and independence. The Open Home Foundation is bound by its mission to serve its users and no one else. There are no investors or shareholders that can force us to prioritize growth over all else. We are building a local smart home built around privacy, choice, and sustainability. And we are building that for you and no one else.

Open Home Donations

The mission of the Open Home Foundation is to support projects that further privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home. This includes the projects we own, like Home Assistant and ESPHome, and the projects we collaborate with, like WLED and Zigbee2MQTT. These open-source smart home projects are an obvious fit, but if you look deeper at the foundations of the Open Home, you’ll see many more projects critical to its operation. Recently, we started recurring donations to Buildroot, Alpine, and aiohttp. We do so not just because we rely on them but also because we believe they support the wider Open Home ecosystem.

Apollo joins Works with Home Assistant

Big news for the Home Assistant community—fan favorite Apollo Automation just joined the Works with Home Assistant program! They’ve certified three of their ESPHome-powered multisensors, ensuring they provide the best experience possible with Home Assistant.

Apollo started as a Home Assistant community-driven project, channeling the community’s feedback into quality products. ESPHome and Home Assistant allow anyone to turn their passion for building cool things into a career, and the things they build help support a more vibrant Open Home. I'm excited to see what Apollo creates next.

Z-Wave’s big Euro trip

This month, several people representing Open Home Foundation projects attended the Z-Wave Alliance European summit. Taking place in Barcelona, this was the first Z-Wave event in Europe in many years, marking a renewed focus on this part of the world. We were able to meet a lot of people from big smart home brands, and face-to-face meetings cannot be underestimated.

This year, the Open Home Foundation even took the chance to help sponsor this event, making sure attendees understood that open source is serious about driving forward this open standard, and expanding protocol choice in Europe. Open Home Foundation collaboration partner project Z-Wave JS is always a hit at these events. Dominic Griesel, Software Engineer at Nabu Casa and Founder of Z-Wave JS, even did a presentation on how we’re accelerating Z-Wave product development with open source. We also brought along our upcoming Z-Wave stick, testing its incredible range and compatibility with devices - let's just say the industry is excited about this one!

Voice Chapter - Speech-to-Phrase

In case you missed it, in our latest voice chapter live stream and blog, we launched Speech-to-Phrase, a new add-on that brings local speech processing to low-powered hardware. This allows everyone to use Assist, our voice assistant, locally and offline on hardware like a Home Assistant Green or Raspberry Pi 4.

There have also been updates to the Atom Echo and ESP32-S3-Box-3, to help them match the capabilities of Voice Preview Edition. Other voice improvements include speeding up Large Language Models responses, support of the Model Context Protocol, and a standalone microWakeWord add-on.

ESPHome Release Party - New Year Edition

ESPHome recently hosted a livestream showcasing its latest features and improvements. This includes simplified display and touchscreen support with the addition of LVGL (Light and Versatile Graphics Library), making it easier than ever to create user interfaces. Audio handling has also been upgraded with dedicated DAC and ADC components, as well as a new media player component that removes Arduino dependencies while adding playlist support, resampling, and mixing—this drive for better audio is a byproduct of our Voice Preview Edition development work. ESP-to-ESP communication is also improving, with direct UDP peer-to-peer messaging and groundwork for future Bluetooth enhancements.

Home Assistant 2025.2: Iterating on backups

In Home Assistant 2025.2, the team packed in some big improvements to the backup system, all based on your feedback. This includes allowing users to turn off encryption for specific backup locations and fine-tune multiple settings. There are also new integrations that allow you to back up to Google Drive and OneDrive.

Assist landlines are back, along with the new ability to broadcast messages across your Assist devices. There’s also a revamped graph engine, laying the groundwork for exciting future features. These are just some of the great new features in this release, so check out the notes to learn more.

Community highlights

Converting cloud to local isn’t easy

James Warner has reverse-engineered a smart air purifier to enable local control with Home Assistant. This was no small feat and involved analyzing the app, intercepting network data, dumping and analyzing the device's firmware, cracking its custom encryption, and then building this all into a server for local control.

Adding NFC to Voice PE

@luka6000 has modified their Voice Preview Edition combining it with their TagTuner NFC reader project connected via the grove port. It allows for a variety of NFC tags Luka 3D prints which trigger actions (for instance, the music playlists looks like a vinyl record 💿).

I know MQTT-fu

u/melancholytron has created a classic Matrix-inspired screensaver that shows live MQTT data. You get used to it, I don't even see the code. All I see is a switch, cover, thermostat.

In other news

Amazon unveils a new AI-powered Alexa, called Alexa+ - It’s finally here and it's got AI pin vibes.... people don’t want to control their homes with voice, they want to blindly order $200 concert tickets. (Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch)
Security researchers find a backdoor in their smart bed - The risks of sleeping on a cloud… I wouldn’t sleep soundly knowing this. (Dylan Ayrey and Jake King, Truffle Security)
Tado heating “tests” charging customers just to open their app - No, this isn’t a paywall for extra services; this is a monthly subscription just to use the basic app, which is currently free 🤦‍♂️. (Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Verge)
Consumer Reports find poor security support on IoT products are building Chinese Botnets - Just a reminder to not expose that ancient wi-fi camera or smart tv to the internet (Stacey Higginbotham, Consumer Reports)
Sonos readies its streaming box with an OS made by an ad company - AND it’s rumored to be very expensive… this comeback seems more like a downfall. (Chris Welch, Verge)