I'm a big fan of home automation, but not in the "use my phone for everything" way but more in the "I shouldn't have to think about it". This means automations based on environmental inputs, routines, etc.

I have based my home automation around the fantastic Home Assistant project since it offers several huge advantages:

• It's locally hosted — I don't want to depend on the cloud for the basic functions of my house, this system needs to work in the case of an internet outage
• It's open source with a huge community — there are thousands of supported integration, and for things that aren't supported there are great generic building blocks and APIs to use
• Vendor agnostic — I don't want to be stuck in a single vendor's ecosystem, and I want my Yale door lock to be able to trigger my Philips Hue lights