I wouldn’t use a system built around someone elses idea of what I can and can’t do, not for Home Automation at least. For many, the amazon, google, apple ecosystems are perfectly fine and I certainly dabbled in them during my journey, but I soon outgrew their offerings and grew frustrated by not being able to do things.

I’ve been automating and adding telemetry to things in my house for over 12 years now, I’m upwards of 900+ entities in my home controlled by Home Assistant and I can’t imgaine having to manage all that through a dinky app, utterly dependant on clouds, the honourable intentions of shareholders, a following wind and working internet. (Chamberlain MyQ comes to mind for some of this, but companies have gone bust, withdrawn features and made them payable and worse.)

I use Home Assistant so I don’t have issues getting devices to talk to each other :-) The home assistant community are rapidly approaching full voice integration (Hot words, spacial microphone arrays etc.) and the range of supporting kit and services is dazzling.