Home Assistant Community add-on deprecation notice

[frenck]

What happened?

Oh hi there 👋

A message to inform you about the deprecation of the AppDaemon Home Assistant Community Add-on.

The reason for this, is that the AppDaemon development stalled.

The last release was: April 2023

Meanwhile, compatibility issues occur with newer Python versions and newer package versions people use in their setups. On the add-on end, keeping up with Alpine Linux upgrades is also a problem as they ship with Python 3.12.

Python 3.13 is also stable already.

I had some hopes when, in September, the message came a new AppDaemon would be released; unfortunately, months later, that still isn't the case.

Therefore, I will be deprecating the Home Assistant Community AppDaemon add-on by tagging a minor release that informs users about this before removing it from the add-on stores in a few months.

Some stats for the last release of the add-on 3 months ago:

• the armv7 version of the add-on was downloaded 1,062 times
• the aarch64 version of the add-on was downloaded 15,897 times
• the amd64 version of the add-on was downloaded 22,652 times

With those amounts it is inevitable that some people will have questions, hence me informing you guys up front.

Thanks for all the great work over the years!

../Frenck

Version

4.4.2

Installation type

Home Assistant add-on

Relevant log output

No response

Relevant code in the app or config file that caused the issue

No response

Anything else?

No response

[chatziko]

This is unfortunate but understandable news.

There should be a plan for moving forward with AppDaemon. It's still an essential project for home automation, used by thousands of people, one of the most mature and stable components of my setup. We don't need that many new features, but maintenance releases to make it easier to update our systems are essential.

What's blocking a new release? How can the community help?

[acockburn]

To be clear, this is a personal decision by Frenck to deprecate his addon support, and that is totally up to him. It in no way impacts or says anything about AppDaemon and its current plans. AppDaemon has been slow to release recently for various reasons I won't go into but it isn't abandoned, and specifically I use it every day still for my own home automation.

I am hopeful that when we release the next version Frenck will revisit this decision, but that is his choice.

AppDaemon is a hobby for me. and I am basically the main developer. I have had assistance over the years form a bunch of smart people whom I appreciate, and in particular, at the moment @stream (on our discord server) has been doing a lot of great work, but it basically comes down to me owning the dev work, managing releases, maintaining the CICD pipeline and a bunch of other stuff. When real life intrudes, AD has to take a back seat, that is the unfortunate reality.

For now, we are working on a plan to get a new version released. Work has been ongoing in the dev branch, it just hasn't made it into an official release yet. We are running on Alpine 3.12 in dev so the work has been done, and we will look at Python 3.13 next.

So please don't lose hope - we will get a release out when we have worked through a couple of issues with the current state of the dev branch, and @stream has volunteered to help with this - thanks John.