Home Automation Went Open Source in 2024 - A BIG Year for Home Assistant
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Is That Still a Trend?. Check out the full article for more insights.
Home Assistant is a home automation platform that's competing with the likes of SmartThings, Google Home, and even Apple. It's differentiator is that unlike the rest, Home Assistant is open source and doesn't really feel open source - apparently you can have your cake and eat it too (somehow).
I've been tinkering with home automation for a long time and love that it's one of the most serious projects I've used - enough that it doesn't feel like it's open source.
And I'm not the only one.
Looking at downloads of the Home Assistant app, which isn't required to set it up but is most likely what every user uses to control their Home Assistant, all the effort to make Home Assistant thrive paid off in 2024.
Our estimates show that 2024 has been a record year for Home Assistant with downloads growing 40% year over year to 1.4M.
Google Play brought in the majority of downloads, 72% of the total, where Germany was the country with the most downloads. That was also the case on the App Store. Together, Germany was responsibe for 21% of all downloads in 2024. However, our App Intelligence is showing downloads in all 100+ countries we provide estimates for.
Although the US wasn't Home Assistant's biggest country, it came in second with 12% of the total. And while you might think that's not much, it's important to note that last year the US's share wasn't even big enough to get into the top 10. That's a big milestone for the open-source project.
Big but still small...
Home Assistant's growth is impressive but the competition is a bit bigger. Our estimates show that Google Home and Alexa, the most popular solutions, saw 32M and 29M downloads, respectively. But the two are on a downward trend, losing roughly 30% of downloads year over year.
SmartThings, the other popular name in home automation, saw 16M new downloads in 2024. Unlike the bigger competitors, SmartThings' downloads are up 15% year over year. So it's not that users don't want home automation but rather that they're not using Google and Amazon as much.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
