On November 4, Josh.ai shipped the Nimble DevSuite+ update it previewed at CEDIA, and buried in the release is the sentence integrators have been asking for since Josh launched: Josh can now “communicate with externally hosted Home Assistant environments.” It also lets dealers build and deploy their own drivers on separate hardware. Both are described as optional and aimed at advanced installers. Both are a bigger deal for how you run your business than for what the homeowner sees.
What actually changed
Three things, and they are worth keeping separate.
- Home Assistant as a device bridge. A Home Assistant instance that you host, on your hardware, can expose its devices to Josh. Zigbee sensors, Z-Wave relays, Matter gadgets, the odd IP device with no native Josh driver: if Home Assistant speaks to it, Josh can now put it in a scene or answer a voice command about it.
- Dealer-built drivers. Integrators get tooling to write and deploy custom drivers. They run on additional hardware and, in Josh’s own words, are “not officially supported or certified by Josh.ai.”
- A certified Nexus 21 TV-lift driver, built by Chowmainsoft, with preset lift positions that drop into scenes. Unrelated to the first two, but it is the first certified lift integration and it closes a gap a lot of theater jobs tripped on.
What did not change: the homeowner’s experience. Nobody in the house gets a Home Assistant dashboard. They talk to Josh, tap the Josh app, press the Josh remote. Home Assistant sits in the rack and translates.
Why Josh did it this way
Josh has always sold a tightly curated experience. Every integration was theirs, certified, and supported, and the price of that was a shorter device list than Control4 or Home Assistant. The long tail of devices was the number one objection in a sales meeting: “Does it do my pool controller, my garage, that one Zigbee sensor I love?”
Nimble DevSuite+ answers the objection without diluting the product. Josh stays in charge of the voice model, the app, lighting, audio, shades and the scenes a family actually uses. The long tail moves to a box the dealer owns. That is a very deliberate line, and it is the same line Josh drew with its uncertified-driver language. Read it as: we will let you do this, and we will not be the ones on the phone when it breaks.
The support boundary is the whole story
Here is the part dealers should sit with. Josh supports Josh. The Home Assistant instance is “independently hosted,” which is a polite way of saying somebody has to own it, patch it, back it up and answer for it at 9 pm on a Sunday. If that somebody is the homeowner, you have just sold a luxury control system with a hobbyist dependency underneath it. If that somebody is you, you have taken on a managed-service obligation, and you should price it like one.
Neither answer is wrong. The wrong answer is not deciding. A Home Assistant box that nobody owns will drift: an integration deprecates, a Zigbee coordinator drops its firmware, an update changes an entity ID, and a scene that worked for a year quietly loses one device. The client will not know it was Home Assistant. They will know Josh “stopped working,” and they will call whoever’s logo is on the rack.
How we would deploy it
- Keep the critical layer native. Lighting, shades, audio, climate and anything in a “good night” or “away” scene runs on certified Josh integrations. Home Assistant gets what Josh cannot do natively, and nothing the family depends on daily.
- Run it on dealer-owned hardware in the rack. A small fanless box on managed power and a UPS, on its own VLAN, with remote access through the same path you use for the rest of the system. Not on the client’s old laptop.
- Pin versions and schedule updates. Home Assistant ships monthly and breaks things monthly. Update on your schedule, after reading the release notes, with a backup taken first. Automatic updates on a client site are how you earn the Sunday call.
- Document which devices live where. One page in the handover packet: this is Josh native, this rides through Home Assistant, this is who to call. Your future self will thank you.
- Put it on a service plan. A monthly line item that covers the box, its updates and its backups. If a client will not pay for that, they should not have the box.
Where this leaves the competition
Control4 and Crestron dealers have had driver ecosystems for years, and plenty of them have quietly run Home Assistant on the side for the devices nobody wrote a driver for. Josh formalizing the same arrangement removes the last structural argument against speccing Josh in a device-heavy house. The argument that remains is the real one: do you want a voice-first, privacy-first system with a short native list and a bridge, or a programmer-first system with a long native list and a programmer on retainer? That is a client conversation, not a feature gap anymore.
Our take: this is the most dealer-friendly thing Josh has shipped. It gives integrators room to solve edge cases without waiting on a roadmap, and it tells them exactly where the warranty ends. Treat that boundary as the product, not the fine print, and it works.
Source: Josh.ai’s Nimble DevSuite+ announcement (josh.ai/stories). Image courtesy of Josh.ai. The Journal is published by the team behind Shield Low Voltage, a Josh.ai dealer in Utah; see About for how we cover products we sell.