The month of 'What the Heck?!' 2024
Franck Nijhof
TL;DR: For all of December 🎄, we are opening up to share any issue, idea, suggestion, or annoyance you have with Home Assistant on our community forums!
Welcome to the month of “What the heck?!”: Third edition
It’s back! 🎉 We are thrilled to announce the third edition of the month of “What the heck?!” (WTH for short). Every two years, we take the time to pause, listen, and dive deep into the little things that maybe you go “What the heck?!” about Home Assistant.
We’ve been growing really hard for years now with over a million Home Assistant-powered smart homes out there, and, as of this year, we are also the #1 open source project on GitHub!
A lot has happened since the last edition two years ago. Lots of effort went into making a voice-controlled Home Assistant a reality. We have implemented new dashboards and cards (with drag-and-drop!), added organization capabilities with labels and categories, and so much more! But did everything turn out the way it should? Did we miss things? Or, worse, did something start to annoy you?
That is what this month is about! This year, we are kicking it off in the month of December as a nice closing activity for this year, and we can’t wait to hear from 👉 YOU 👈!
Lowering the barrier for sharing WTH?! moments
We realize reporting bugs on our GitHub
While this is a common and reasonable process to collect, track, and process bugs, our issue tracking-process might not be the ideal way to learn about your “What the heck?!” moments, small tweaks, and improvements that can make us all enjoy Home Assistant even more.
Today, we have opened up a Community Forum category as a safe, lower-barrier place to talk about your Home Assistant “What the heck?!” moments. More importantly: discuss and vote on topics your fellow home automators have brought up.
What are we looking for?
Just as with previous editions, I sent out a related question on my socials earlier this week:
🎅 𝘚𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢 𝘮𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨… If you could ask for one small Home Assistant improvement this holiday season, what would it be?
The answers to this question pretty much capture the goal behind this month: Finding those nice quality-of-life features and little annoyances, highlighting inconsistencies, suggestions for things that could be streamlined more, and even big-ticket items. All of those things would make Home Assistant even more awesome for everyone.
I’ve received many responses on these social media posts on X
- “Makes exposing entities to HomeKit the same as to Alexa & Google” (Peter Hardy-vanDoorn
) -
“Polygon zones would be so very helpful instead of just the base circle” (KrispKiwi
) - “Edit a scene without activating it. I can only edit my sleep scene after everyone goes to sleep or in YAML.” (codebuild21
) -
“The possibility of catching errors in automations and being able to take actions when they occur 🙂” (Sergio Mayoral
) -
“Not Fancy! Better backup management, especially pruning options!” (Alex Alami
) -
“Persist my prefered dashboard across my different devices/browsers.” (Carlos Sánchez López
) -
“Home Assistant voice hardware!” (Paulus Schoutsen
) 😆
These are all great topics for the month of “What the heck?!”, I hope they inspire you for more topics to share 💖.
Roadmap
As you might be aware, we also create and publish a bigger, high level, roadmap
for the greater direction of Home Assistant. A few weeks back, Madelena
This year’s month of “What the heck?!” is thus different in this regard, as in previous editions we didn’t have any roadmap in place. For this year’s WTH, the product team will also be watching for items that will help shape and prioritize our roadmap for the near future.
As a matter of fact, many items on this year’s roadmap that we’ve worked on have their origins or have been shaped by topics from the previous WTH from 2022. For example, the ability to organize automations and the ability to drag-and-drop cards on your dashboards.
Why December?
In the previous editions, we had this month in October; this year, we decided to move it to December. We figured, the holiday season is perfect for this event. 🎄
Many of us have a bit more time on our hands during the holidays, whether that’s tinkering with automations, exploring our new dashboards, contributing to our project, or simply enjoying engaging our active and vibrant community.
Start sharing your WTH!
👆That title says it all really. Start sharing your “What the heck?!” moment, browse through all the WTH moments others brought up, and vote for the ones you feel the same about.
We are excited about this month and looking forward to everything brought up!
Join us on the forums!, or read the FAQ below.
So, when does Home Assistant trigger this moment for you?
FAQ
-
“Great! I have multiple things! Should I put all my stuff in a single topic?!”
No, please create multiple, smaller topics. There is no limitation on how many forum topics one can create for WTH. Each topic can be voted on, picked up, and maybe even resolved. Also, having multiple things stacked in a single forum topic makes resolving, discussing, and voting on them hard.
-
“Is everything reported going to be fixed/addressed?”
Sorry, but the answer here is no; there is no guarantee that it will happen. The goal is to lower the barrier reporting things for one month. Code contributors will definitely join the effort and address a few of the listed things. Still, in the end, the number of submissions in WTH is, in general, simply too much to address. However, we have picked up a lot of items over the years (including bigger topics); it helps us shape our roadmap.
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“I really want this new integration or add-on to be implemented, so I can use my devices. Is this the right place for it?”
No, this event is not for requesting new add-ons or device/services integrations. Please use the “Feature Requests” forum category instead.
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“My WTH topic is one of the top-voted ones, so it is going to be fixed/addressed, right?”
This is not a contest. Voting will help with visibility and give a sense of the suggestion’s impact. However, it might be difficult or too big to implement. A topic with lots of votes is more likely to be noticed by a contributor, but it is not guaranteed to be picked up.
Topics with a lot of engagement, of course, help us shape our future roadmap.
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“I’ve found a bug and am comfortable with GitHub. Where should I report my issue now?”
If you are comfortable using GitHub, please, by all means, file an issue report on GitHub
instead.