With Home Assistant the last few years weve been focusing on making things easier, stable, and faster. More things can be managed via the UI, most YAML-based integrations can be reloaded without restarting and if something breaks, safe mode and built-in backups have your back.
We have amazing contributors who work on making Home Assistant better every single day. However, you cant keep growing by adding new things in the same structure. An interface made for 4 items will become confusing once the 10th item is added (like our profile page). A veteran Home Assistant user might be fine because they have seen the growth feature by feature and know exactly where to find what. For new users it is overwhelming.
For 2022 the motto will be streamlining experiences . We want to better organize and integrate all the different features that make up Home Assistant.
For example, there should be a built-in way, for both YAML and the UI, to easily send a notification with a camera snapshot to your phone, pick a song to play for an automation, or use text-to-speech to notify you when something is happening. All these things are possible today but require too much knowledge of how the various parts work.
Well have 11 releases this year and each release should streamline more things.
Have a good and healthy 2022 and see you at our first release on February 2!
Paulus
