In December 2024 I sat down with a coffee and spent twenty minutes answering questions about my house. How I got into this. What I own. Who else lives with the automations I write at eleven at night. Whether privacy, choice and sustainability actually matter to me, or whether I just say they do in forum threads.
Then I forgot about it completely, the way you forget about every survey you have ever filled in.
On 26 August the Open Home Foundation published the answers. Not a tidy infographic with four friendly bar charts, either — the anonymised dataset itself, 8,616 responses, free for anyone to download and take apart. I did not expect that. And the longer I sit with it, the more I think the act of releasing it matters more than anything inside it.
What they actually asked
The 2024 community survey opened on 16 December 2024 and closed on 20 January 2025. It was long — the team said to set aside about twenty minutes, and that was honest rather than optimistic. Every question was optional, responses were anonymous, and there was a partial submit point halfway through so that people who ran out of patience still counted for something.
What surprised me at the time was how far past “which integrations do you use” it went. Household composition. Professional background. Neurodiversity. How you personally weigh the Open Home values, not how you would rank them if someone was watching. Annika Schulz, the Foundation’s UX researcher, explained the point plainly when the survey launched: rather than keep assuming what the community wants, the team would “rather base our decisions on data-driven insights”.
That is a normal thing for a company to say. It is a less normal thing for a company to then prove eighteen months later by publishing the file.
I am, embarrassingly, the average respondent
The headline picture the Foundation draws from the responses: a large majority describe themselves as tech-curious, most have been running Home Assistant for three years or more, households average 2.8 people, and device counts cluster somewhere between eleven and a hundred.
I read that and felt slightly exposed. Three-plus years in: yes. Device count comfortably inside that band: yes. Tech-curious rather than professionally technical: also yes — I run Home Assistant OS bare-metal on a second-hand HP EliteDesk 800 G4 not because I am a sysadmin, but because I got annoyed enough at cloud outages to read the docs properly.
There is something genuinely useful in landing in the middle of a distribution, though, and it is not flattering self-recognition. It is that sitting at the centre tells you exactly what the distribution cannot see.
The release is the actual story
Almost every company that runs a user survey publishes a short post with a few cheerful percentages and keeps the rest. The raw responses become internal ammunition — useful for winning roadmap arguments, never useful to you. The dataset is the asset, so the dataset stays in the building.
The Open Home Foundation gave it away, and this is not a one-off gesture. In July they moved their web analytics to self-hosted Plausible and put the dashboard in public, so anyone can see the traffic numbers for home-assistant.io. A week before that, the community device database went into public preview, built from voluntarily shared, anonymised device data rather than scraped telemetry.
Three moves in about five weeks, all pointing the same direction: the organisation applying its own privacy argument to itself, in the one situation where it would benefit from not doing so. That is rarer than it sounds. Selling local-first to other people is easy. Accepting the same constraints when you are the one who would profit from the data is the part most companies quietly skip.
What 8,616 people cannot tell you
Here is the caveat I would want printed on the front of the file. The survey lived on the Home Assistant blog and the project’s social accounts. To answer it, you had to already be reading the blog, already be following the project, and already care enough to give up twenty minutes of an evening.
Home Assistant passed two million homes in 2025. Against that, 8,616 responses is a fraction of a percent — and specifically the most engaged fraction. Everyone who installed Home Assistant, hit a Zigbee pairing wall in week two, and quietly went back to the vendor app is not in this dataset. Neither is the partner who lives with your automations, resents the motion-triggered hallway light, and has never opened the dashboard.
That is not a flaw anyone can fix. A voluntary, anonymous survey is structurally incapable of reaching the people who left. But it does mean the file describes the community that stayed, and those two things are not the same population — which matters, because the people who left are exactly who the “approachable by design” direction of 2026.8 is aimed at.
What I would like someone to do with it
Since the data is open, the interesting work is now everyone else’s. The cross-tabs I would run first: how stated commitment to the Open Home values tracks against device count, because I suspect the relationship is weaker than the community assumes. How many households have a second person who touches the system at all. And whether professional background predicts anything about which integrations people abandon.
None of that requires permission or an NDA. It requires a download and an afternoon. If a second wave ever runs, year-over-year comparison becomes possible too, and that is where a survey like this stops being a snapshot and starts being a trend line.
I filled in a form eighteen months ago and forgot about it. What came back was not a marketing post telling me who I am — it was a file I can check for myself. In a smart-home industry that treats user data as an asset to be held, being handed your own answers back, anonymised and open to everyone, is a small thing that says a great deal about who is running the project.
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