I don’t know if Home Assistant is so niche. Everyone who does some form of smart home comes to the point where there are several manufacturers forcing you to use their own app. If you’re lucky you can use something like Google Home or Siri to have a unified control interface, but these are usually very basic. You can try to stick to one system for as long as possible, but sooner or later that will fail. A system like Home Assistant is the inevitable solution to these problems and it is a very good thing that HA exists as a strong and open software to solve this problem.
I tend to find we more tech savvy people vastly overestimate how tech savvy the average person is.
However, I suspect you are right about the people interested in home automation eventually hitting that point and coming across Home Assistant.
Home Assistant have done a great job reducing the barrier to entry. Significant improvements in UI editors and all but removing the need for any YAML config for an average user. Plus the Home Assistant Yellow and Green meaning you no longer need to know how to set up a server and can instead buy a hub off the shelf. Surely these efforts are a big part of why the number of installations has increased so much.
I don’t know if Home Assistant is so niche. Everyone who does some form of smart home comes to the point where there are several manufacturers forcing you to use their own app. If you’re lucky you can use something like Google Home or Siri to have a unified control interface, but these are usually very basic. You can try to stick to one system for as long as possible, but sooner or later that will fail. A system like Home Assistant is the inevitable solution to these problems and it is a very good thing that HA exists as a strong and open software to solve this problem.
I tend to find we more tech savvy people vastly overestimate how tech savvy the average person is.
However, I suspect you are right about the people interested in home automation eventually hitting that point and coming across Home Assistant.
Home Assistant have done a great job reducing the barrier to entry. Significant improvements in UI editors and all but removing the need for any YAML config for an average user. Plus the Home Assistant Yellow and Green meaning you no longer need to know how to set up a server and can instead buy a hub off the shelf. Surely these efforts are a big part of why the number of installations has increased so much.