The Open Home Foundation, the non-profit behind Home Assistant and ESPHome, has published a position paper called "Choice in the smart home". It went up on the foundation's website on 22 October 2026 and spells out what the foundation wants manufacturers to build and what it wants legislators to make law. These are recommendations. Nothing in the paper is binding on anyone yet.

What it asks of devices

The paper says smart home devices should be interoperable by design and lists five requirements:

  • Open source hardware and software should be prioritised through licensing, funding and other support, including free alternatives to paid features where possible.
  • Open connectivity standards that are vendor-neutral and publicly available. A smart bulb should talk to other systems over such a standard, ideally built in, or at least through a widely available, reasonably priced adapter.
  • Documented APIs and hardware. An API that exists but is not publicly documented does not count. Documentation should cover the product's main functions, with limits accepted for critical security issues.
  • Local-first control. Devices should keep working locally "without arbitrary limits" when they cannot reach the internet or servers outside the home.
  • Low barriers: no mandatory first-party app to set up or use a feature, and no account on someone else's server, even just for onboarding.

The examples are familiar to anyone who has followed cloud outages: a bed that overheats or will not lie flat during an internet outage, a heating system that cannot be controlled remotely because the vendor's servers are down, and a doorbell camera whose update removes features.

What it asks of lawmakers

Three points are aimed at legislators. The first is a legal right to "adversarial interoperability": individuals and all but the largest businesses should be allowed to tinker with, improve or extend existing smart home products without the original maker's permission.

The second is a ban on a list of anti-consumer practices. It names walled gardens, deceptive patterns used to track users, surveillance pricing, and any third-party use of smart home data without clear, opt-in, revocable consent.

The third covers changes after purchase. Manufacturers should not be allowed to permanently remove basic functionality through software, firmware or hardware updates. The exceptions are specific, credible security risks and technical problems that cannot be solved with reasonable resources. Hardware revisions that make a product work worse or last less should be clearly labelled, for example with a new model name or version.

The foundation's own programme is included

The paper says "Works with" and similar certification programmes should be regulated so they cannot be used to restrict access arbitrarily or as pay-to-play barriers. A footnote points out that the foundation runs one itself, Works with Home Assistant.

It also argues that choice includes closed products. People should not be pushed into using only open source or highly interoperable devices, and open systems such as Home Assistant should try to work with closed products too.

For Home Assistant users, little of this is new: local control and documented APIs are what the project has asked for all along. What is new is a written list of demands addressed to legislators, which the foundation can now point to in policy debates.