Why we wrote this
Over the past year, we’ve noticed that a large percentage of new Astrion Remote users have something in common — they previously relied on Logitech Harmony. After hearing the same questions and stories again and again, we thought it would be interesting to look at why so many Home Assistant users are making the same transition. This article isn’t a product pitch. It’s an exploration of where we’ve been, where we are, and where physical control might be heading.
"Nobody was really looking for a new remote. They were looking for a way to control an entirely new kind of home."
There was a time when almost every serious home theater enthusiast owned a Logitech Harmony remote. Whether it was the Harmony One, the Ultimate, the Elite, or the unassuming Harmony Hub tucked behind the TV, these remotes became the center of countless living rooms around the world. They solved a real, everyday frustration — the coffee table buried under a pile of remotes, the baffling input sequences, the phone calls from family members who just wanted to watch a movie.
Many of us still have one sitting on the coffee table today. And even after Logitech discontinued the Harmony product line, the community continued to keep it alive — maintaining software, sharing device codes, and stretching those aging hubs far beyond their original design — because there simply wasn’t a true replacement.
Harmony didn't just simplify the living room—it fundamentally changed how people thought about controlling home entertainment.
Few products earn that kind of legacy. It earned its place in the smart home hall of fame. Acknowledging that isn’t just respectful; it’s the starting point for understanding what came next.
What made Harmony special
The magic of Harmony wasn’t just in the hardware. It was in the mental model. Press “Watch a Movie” and the TV turned on, the receiver switched to the right input, the Blu-ray player started, and maybe — if you were lucky — the lights dimmed. It felt seamless. Physical buttons, a simple screen, and Activities that anyone in the household could understand without a manual. Harmony made home theater control family-friendly.
It also nailed the fundamentals: a vast database of devices, reliable infrared control, and enough flexibility to handle complicated setups. For a decade, it was the default recommendation for anyone who wanted to simplify their living room.
But the smart home grew up around it
While Harmony was perfecting the art of the media remote, the rest of the home was changing. Home Assistant, once considered a hobbyist platform, matured into one of the world's most flexible home automation systems, from a hobbyist project into a platform that ties together lighting, climate, security, energy monitoring, voice assistants, presence detection, cameras, garage doors, blinds, and — yes — media. Protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, and Thread exploded. Integrations now cover Android TV, Apple TV, Sonos, Hue, Shelly, KNX, ESPHome, MQTT, and hundreds more.
Harmony was designed for a different era. Its cloud-dependent API became increasingly fragile. Its Activities were media-centric at heart, and extending them beyond basic home control meant awkward workarounds — if it worked at all. You couldn’t easily trigger a Home Assistant script, display a security camera feed, or lower a Zigbee blind from your Harmony remote without heroic effort. As homes got smarter, many Harmony users found themselves with one remote for the TV and a phone, tablet, or voice assistant for everything else. The promise of a single, unifying controller quietly faded.
What users actually started looking for
When you listen to the conversations happening in Home Assistant forums, on Reddit, and in integrator communities, you hear the same wishes over and over. Nobody is saying “I need a new remote.” They’re saying things like:
- “I want one button that turns on the TV, dims the lights, closes the blinds, and pauses the music downstairs.”
- “I want to see my front-door camera when the doorbell rings, without finding my phone.”
- “I want to arm the alarm from the couch.”
- “I want my kids to be able to start a movie without navigating through three different apps and a receiver menu.”
They’re not asking for a better universal remote. They’re asking for a physical interface to their entire smart home — something that feels as natural as a Harmony but can speak the language of Home Assistant. And they want it to work locally, without cloud dependencies that could disappear overnight.
Even after Logitech announced the end of Harmony in 2021...
From universal remote to home controller
This is exactly the shift we set out to understand when designing Astrion Remote. The goal wasn’t to build a Harmony clone, but to rethink what a “remote” means when the thing you’re controlling is no longer just a media stack — it’s an entire automated home.
A useful way to visualize the change is to compare the mental model of a classic Harmony Activity with the kind of workflow a modern home controller enables.
text
2008:
TV → Receiver → Blu-ray
↓
Harmony Activity
text
2026:
TV + Lights + Climate + Garage + Doorbell
+ Music + Security + Camera
↓
Home Assistant
↓
Astrion (physical interface)
Everything lives on a single device with physical buttons and a dynamic touchscreen. You can design a view that shows a camera feed, weather, your lights, and media controls all at once. A single button can dim the living room, lock the doors, start a playlist, and turn off every screen in the house. Because it’s built on top of Home Assistant with local control, there’s no cloud dependency, no fragile API, and no split between “entertainment” and “everything else.”
The community conversation
None of this would have been visible without the community. Over the past year, we’ve watched the same pattern emerge again and again in our own forum, on Reddit, and in direct conversations with people setting up Astrion for the first time. Comments like:
“I’ve been using a Harmony Elite for years, but I’m finally making the switch.”
“Is there a way to get Android TV controls like I had with Harmony?”
“I just need Activities that can also run my Home Assistant scripts.”
“Are there any plans for deeper Sonos integration?”
These aren’t requests from newcomers. They’re from people who have already automated their homes and are now looking for a physical remote that can keep up. They’re not abandoning Harmony because it was bad — they’re moving on because the world around it has changed, and the community has built something bigger.
Interestingly, we aren’t only seeing homeowners make this transition. Increasingly, professional installers who previously deployed Harmony alongside Control4, Crestron, RTI, or Savant are now looking for a Home Assistant-native remote that offers both flexibility and local control. For them, it’s not just about replacing a device; it’s about finding a platform that can evolve with their clients’ homes without locking them into a closed ecosystem.
Where We're Still Improving
A physical controller for a platform as vast as Home Assistant is still a work in progress. There are areas where things aren’t as polished as they will be, and some Harmony-like features that are still on the roadmap:
- Deeper, more responsive Sonos control (the single most requested improvement)
- More flexible screen layouts and additional card types
- Enhanced lighting controls with better colour temperature UI
- More tools for professional installers deploying across multiple rooms
- Ongoing performance and battery life improvements
If you need absolute feature parity with a ten-year-old Harmony on day one, there are rough edges to be aware of. But if local control, real Home Assistant integration, and a device that’s being actively shaped by community feedback matter more to you, then the landscape has already started to shift in a very interesting direction.
The Next Chapter
Harmony taught an entire generation that controlling technology should feel effortless.
Home Assistant has shown us that a home can be far more than a collection of entertainment devices.
Now we're all discovering what comes next.
Whether you're still holding onto a Harmony Elite, building your first Home Assistant dashboard, or designing a fully automated home from scratch, we're glad you're part of this journey.
The story isn't over.
It's just entering its next chapter.
Special thanks to the Home Assistant community, countless Harmony enthusiasts, installers, and members of the Sanytron community whose ideas, feature requests, and discussions inspired many of the thoughts shared in this article.
We'd love to hear your experience. Whether you share your thoughts in our forum, on Reddit, in Discord, or simply discuss this article with fellow smart home enthusiasts, every conversation helps shape the future of products like Astrion.
Life After Harmony: Why Smart Homes Needed More Than a Universal Remote