Thirteen years of Home Assistant: Leading the way back home
Welcome to the September 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!
It’s Home Assistant’s 13th birthday today! 🎉 As our flagship project officially enters its teens (hopefully skipping the slammed doors and mood swings), I’ve been reflecting on what an epic journey it’s been so far…
Leading the way back home
A quiet room. September 2013. Just me at my desk writing a single line of code to switch on my smart lights. I simply wanted them to work locally. I had no idea it would be the start of such an adventure.
Today, I look at what this community has built and I’m blown away. Together we’ve grown a thriving Home Assistant ecosystem that’s now trusted in more than 2.7 million homes, with over 20,000 contributors worldwide tirelessly pushing the project forward. An army of supporters, all shielded by the Open Home Foundation. We did all this without a single cent of venture capital. We refuse to have investors demanding we monetize our users’ personal lives. Instead, we created a business model based on people power.
We’ve made incredible progress, but 13 years in our fight is far from over – and the corporate monsters in your living room are getting bolder and more brazen by the day.
In short, they’ve stopped even pretending to give a shit about your privacy.
You should own the glass
Just look at Gamers Nexus’s infuriating investigation into LG’s Smart TVs (or eavesdropping listening devices). It shows, in devastating detail, that LG execs think the company still owns the screen you’ve just spent $3,000 on. They’re captured on camera in pitches to advertisers saying: “We own the glass.” That crosses the line by a mile, and tells us exactly what they think of you when they think you’re not watching.
I can’t believe I have to say this out loud: when you buy a device with your hard-earned cash, bring it through your front door, and power it with your own electricity – that is YOUR device. Period. All data it gathers belongs to you, and you alone get to decide what happens to it. We wrote this into our Privacy Paper as a line in the sand, and we’ll never back down from it.
This sort of predatory, consumer-hostile behavior is becoming increasingly common: in fact, it’s something we cover every month in this very newsletter. So, do we get depressed? Do we pull the plug and retreat into an offline bunker? Hell no. We build. That’s why we’re working alongside Nabu Casa right now on something brand new to help you take back the glass 👀
For me, the state of the industry isn’t a reason to despair – it’s a battle cry. It’s proof of why we exist and a sign that we can never give up until everyone who’s been let down by Big Tech knows it doesn’t have to be like this.
There is another way
The key to winning the war isn’t less technology. It’s better technology: open, local, and quietly on your side. The kind that unlocks the simple, unfiltered pleasure of relaxing on an armchair, a warm lamp overhead as you turn a page of a good book, with your devices working silently out of sight, maintaining your comfort without ever shattering that perfect, peaceful moment. People just need to know it exists.
That’s why we showed up at IFA Berlin this month. We didn’t go to fit in with the corporate crowd – we went to crash the party and offer visitors a taste of the alternative (more on this below 👇). Setting up a booth at a major public trade show marks a new chapter for the foundation, as we set out to inspire the millions of people unhappy with the hold Big Tech has over their homes, but don’t yet know the way out.
Our fight won’t be over until everyone who wants to regain control can find their way back. Together, we’ll map the route home.
ELTAKO go above and beyond!
Great news, ELTAKO just donated 25,000 CHF (around 30,000 USD) to the Open Home Foundation 🎉
One of the awesome things that’s grown out of Home Assistant in the last 13 years is the Works with Home Assistant program, and ELTAKO are a great example why. Since joining as partners just over a year ago, they’ve shown up at community meetups, attended State of the Open Home, and kept in touch with the team – including joining us at IFA Berlin earlier this month!
A family-run business, ELTAKO design and build relay switches, sensors, smart building controls, and more. But while they have over 75 years of experience in the industry, they’re all for championing modern open standards like Matter – promoting energy efficiency across the smart home landscape.
Their support strengthens our mission to fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability for all smart homes 💪 Thanks ELTAKO!
New from the Open Home Foundation
Thirteen years in, and Home Assistant keeps getting better each and every month! Check out our latest releases below.
✅ ESPHome 2026.9.0: Faster builds and encrypted updates
✅ Home Assistant 2026.9: There’s room on this bus
And if all this talk of birthdays has you in the mood for a party, watch the Home Assistant release to join the celebration 🥳
Help build a better voice assistant
📢 Our commercial partners Nabu Casa are testing a significant upgrade to Home Assistant Cloud’s speech-to-text: better accents, improved background noise handling, and more languages. To try it out, update to the latest release, turn it on in Labs, and let us know what you think.
Coming home at IFA Berlin
Every year, the world’s biggest tech brands descend on Berlin for IFA – flashing screens, clinical corporate stands, products wrapped in promises. This year, for the first time, we had a booth there too. But we didn’t bring anything to sell. We brought a comfy living room. That’s right, our main goal was to provide a place for people to meet face-to-face and chill. We’re all about technology that serves people: tech that doesn’t overload your senses, but gives you a break by helping to create somewhere to sit down and relax.
What I didn’t expect was how much people needed that sanctuary. Community members and creators volunteered their time to staff the booth alongside our team, leading to conversations unlike anything I’ve experienced at a trade show. Real users, real stories – some people had never even heard of us before, while others came to Berlin specifically to hang out with us.
I also made time to walk the floor: catching up with Works with Home Assistant partners and discovering a few like-minded companies building things we believe in… as well as giving some interviews along the way. Turns out people wanted to hear from us as much as we wanted to talk to them!
Check out the vibe, and a bunch more photos, on our blog. For highlights of the show (with footage from our booth, naturally 🙌) check out Reed from Smart Home Solver’s video below.
Community meetups
Become a Community Day host: It’s easier than you think!
The countdown to Community Day 2026 (November 7) has begun! But there’s still plenty of time to get involved and host a meetup. Last month we promised details on how we’ll support hosts at this year’s global event… and here they are! Everything you need is now live on our new Community Day website: a Community Meetups Playbook that includes reimbursement guidelines, plus merchandise requests (deadline October 5 ⏰), a Luma calendar to add your event, and more. Now all you have to do is sign up!
Can’t make Community Day? You can still enjoy the company of other open source fans in your area. If you live around Lisbon (where the entire Open Home Foundation team will be in attendance! 👋), sign up now! Or set up your own event.
Help us build the Open Home
Hosting a meetup for Community Day is a great way to support our mission – but if you’re not around on November 7, here are some other ways to join our fight for privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes.
Shop our store
Show your love for our principles and projects with our range of high quality, ethically made apparel and accessories.
Support our work
Subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud or buy official Home Assistant or ESPHome products from our commercial partners.
Share your skills
Contribute code, translations, documentation, or designs to any of our projects – or sponsor a maintainer directly on GitHub or Ko-Fi.
In other news this month
Rage against the TV
If you’re still recovering from my rant in the opener to this newsletter, you may want to brace yourself. Gamers Nexus have been at it again. LG responded to the team’s original investigation, calling it “not true” – without a shred of counter-evidence, of course. This follow-up video dismantles that statement line by line, catches LG quietly rewriting its own denials, and reveals new findings showing LG TVs can be geolocated down to the nearest street using nothing but native functionality. I’m still mad, but there is something satisfying about watching LG dig a deeper hole…
Tesla sunsets its Solar Roof
Tesla promised its Solar Roof would generate clean energy for decades. Last month, it quietly killed it off as “not financially viable.” Three thousand homeowners are now left with complex proprietary systems that have almost nobody to service them – since installers who sank hundreds of thousands into specialist training are also stranded. An unhappy ending for a product that was supposed to save the planet… and help justify a $2.6 billion acquisition 👀 I still believe solar has a bright future – just not when built on empty proprietary promises.
Your car is tracking you too
Earlier this year the US Federal Trade Commission banned General Motors from selling customer data to brokers – after it emerged many drivers had unknowingly consented to having their speed and night driving tracked. Having read the Mozilla Foundation’s report on car manufacturer privacy policies back in 2023, I wasn’t shocked – but if this is the first you’re hearing of it, buckle up. This piece from The Verge breaks it all down, but the upshot is: if your car’s data flows through the cloud, it’s not yours anymore. Which is exactly why local control matters.
Pebble turns back time
The original Pebble watch launched around the same time as Home Assistant, but sadly its story was cut short in 2016. Now Pebble is back – and, true to form, fully open source, API-accessible, and yours to do what you want with.
I bought one in a fit of nostalgia, and immediately installed the community-built Home Assistant app to bring it right up to date. Now I can control my smart home from my wrist with voice commands, while my son and I have already built our own watch faces and games… some things never get old.
We didn’t sign up for this…
John Oliver’s recent deep-dive into subscriptions on Last Week Tonight is amusing viewing for anyone who’s ever tried to cancel something and found themselves going 10 rounds with a chatbot 🥊 But beyond the comedy, it makes a serious point: the subscription model has quietly colonized our homes, appliances, and data. We’ve gone from owning things to renting access to them: looking for a way out? You know where to find us 😉
Community highlights
Xavier Larrea’s Kiosk Satellite turns any Android tablet into a dedicated Home Assistant control panel – with wake word detection even when the screen’s off, music via Sendspin, and photo screensavers. You can even hold up fingers to the camera to trigger actions. Pretty impressive ✌️
Fed up with DIY buttons and Hue remotes with flat batteries, NiceHatThanks built Scoopy: a tiny room node for ESPHome and Home Assistant with status LEDs and optional presence sensing. It comes in mouth-watering colors like Vanilla, Watermelon, Spearmint, and Fudge 🍦 I’ll have one of each please!
Sacrebleu Studio built a walnut and aluminum motorized fader console for their house lights: r/homeassistant’s verdict? “Bonkers. Idiotic. Waste of time. I love it!” Mine too.
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