Good Evening
I recently read the Blog Post for the 2021 releases and was hoping I can ask a few questions …General ones. But before I do please don’t misunderstand anything I say as I am not looking for conflict or talking down anything in a negative way. I am merely asking these things for my own clarifications.
I’ll start by saying I have been with Indigo 6 or 7 years now and while I tinkered here and there with some other systems for the most part Indigo has always seemed to check most my boxes so I have stuck with it. Each year I would see one or two disgruntled customers wanting more and the posts would turn into some sort of flaming post and again that’s not the objective here.
In recent months I have struggled internally with my Home Automation direction. I think that comes from my personal belief of what Home Automation means to me. In November my subscription expired and I been meaning to make a similar post to the one I am making now. See I am struggling with should I renew. I am looking for a reason to fall in love with the Home Automation Scene again and I am feeling like its been stale lately. You see these amazing commercials (Fibaro) of all that Home Automation has to offer but in reality it doesn’t often work in such an elegant way.
My most recently struggle in the past few months is the feeling that the industry is passing my system by. By that I mean many of latest and greatest toys coming to market are taking years if at all to be officially supported by Indigo. Don’t get me wrong Indigo probably has some of the sharpest developers in its community bringing fantastic plugins to the system. My struggle is sometimes these plugins add great functionality and then become unsupported. Again not often but it had happened. I have always hoped that many of the core functions become an officially supported (like Itunes) plugin. Other core functions that I feel are important to the system have yet to have any real official development like Native Energy Consumption reporting. Again plugins have been developed but some are outside the system while others are just to complicated and break to easy leaving one to just abandon the idea.
When I read the recent blog I got the interpretation the April’s big updates will be adding functionality to allow other developers to build functionality instead of building a cradle to grave solution internally. Again maybe I am misunderstanding as I am not a developer. I just am interrupting the features being added to being geared toward developers building plugins more and less toward the end user who is wanting core functionality built in or out of box.
Again I mean no disrespect and my general question is will indigo be adding true native core functionality in the coming year. Voice control….Push Notification…Energy Reporting… things like this or will these features still rely on 3rd parties for solutions?