In these Behind the Magic series, we give an overview of what we worked on the month before. Please be warned that the contents might get a little technical now and then.
Happy new year to you all! I hope you had a wonderful time with your friends & family and Homey.
Homey v2.0
Homey v2.0 has been available as experimental update for a month and in 11 updates we've fixed almost all issues. With only a few remaining, it's almost ready to be released as a stable update, which means everyone can download the free update.
More than 1500 Homeys have joined the public beta of v2.0, and we've received a ton of useful data and issue reports. Truth be told, it was hard work to keep up with all the e-mails. I'd like to shout out to all bèta testers that reported their findings, but also their feedback and compliments.
Our support team did a great job by handling this influx of e-mails. By doing their work amazing our development team could solve these issues at an incredible speed.
Fun fact: in the first few days, when all Homeys connected to our cloud, we had a few issues because too many Homeys connected at the same time. Oops! But that's why we test. Now that we've solved that issue, our servers are handling the traffic very, very well:
Insights
We have released Homey Insights, available on https://insights.athom.com on desktop and mobile. Homey v2.0 users can get satisfy their inner data nerd by viewing all of their home's statistics. By using it I've already found that my power-hungry fridge is ready for replacement...
On the back-end we've completely redesigned Insights. The big problem with the old solution was that the database just kept growing over time.
Insights in Homey v2.0 keeps your data for years, by averaging data over time to reduce disk space. For example, if you look at an energy monitor's log two years ago, you'll see an average per day. And if you look at the last hour, you'll see a value every five seconds.
A log, which is automatically created for Devices and Variables, now has a fixed amount of disk space, meaning a virtual unlimited number of logs.
Apps
Many of our apps have been updated to make full use of Homey's new features. Some app updates are already available straight away and some are currently in bèta, waiting for the Homey v2.0 release.
Developers
Now that we have ensured that Homey v2.0 works very well, it is time to freeze it's feature set. We are taking the coming week to update the developer documentation for the Apps SDK. With Homey v2.0, most apps should be compatible already. We encourage developers to check if their apps still look great in the new interface and tweak their app accordingly.
As a start, a capability and device class reference has already been added on Homey Developer.
For developers creating OAuth2-based apps, a new module homey-oauth2app has been created to lift the hard work. We will document this module as soon™ as possible.
— Emile
