The first of many: Our 2025 Annual Report
Pull up a chair, because the foundation's 2025 Annual Report is here and packed with a year's worth of growth, milestones, and building with our community.
Last year marked an exciting new chapter for the Open Home Foundation. Restructuring as a nonprofit Stiftung (foundation) meant a major shift in how we operate. And with that came new ways of working, partnerships, and ownership of community-led projects that help us fulfill our mission: to protect privacy, choice, and sustainability in the smart home.
As part of our commitment to building in the open, this week we're proud to publish the foundation's very first Annual Report for 2025 🎉 From structural changes to big new projects, the report gives a detailed look into who we are and how we operate, along with our wins of 2025 and our plans for what's next. Read on for a snapshot of what you'll find…
A mission driving it all
As the main alternative to Big Tech in the smart home space, transparency is central to how we operate. We launched our efforts to build in the open this year – a commitment to co-develop our projects with the larger community, from pre-planning to production – and publishing our 2025 Annual Report is another way of walking the talk.
In a smart home landscape rife with walled gardens, digital surveillance, and a profit-over-people culture – championing local, open source tech that makes your smart home really yours is more important than ever.
Our Annual Report highlights our goals and growth, the real challenges we've worked through, and the areas in which we're committed to improving. Part of what makes us different is that we're not a big corporation. We're a group of passionate humans committed to safeguarding the future of the Open Home. This report is proof of the work – and there's a lot more where that came from!
Laying new foundations
Our restructuring wasn't just a legal formality – it was a chance to rebuild the way we work from the ground up. We overhauled our internal governance to create a clearer separation between our Board, Leadership Committee, and Back Office, and took steps to reduce the risk and perception of conflicts of interest.
This change enabled the Open Home Foundation to invest in salaried staff, whose purpose is to support our community and the day-to-day operations that keep our open source projects sustainable. In turn, our volunteer community has space to focus on what they do best: making creative contributions that keep the smart home open for all.
With a new structure and rapidly growing teams, it's more important than ever that our work lives up to our values. That's why we established a semi-independent Policy & Principles Working Group. It exists to explore and articulate what we believe in, act as a champion for our ideals internally and externally, and help keep us focused on our founding principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability.
Along with welcoming a second commercial partner, Apollo Automation, and launching a new fundraising initiative – we have greatly improved the stability and long-term viability of our work. And that lets us focus, like never before, on our community.
A milestone and a high point
Reaching over two million active Home Assistant installations worldwide in 2025, quite honestly, blew us away. That number represents a 28% increase from the previous year, meaning more smart homes than ever are running on technology that respects privacy and choice.
The spirit of building together was on full display at our first ever Open Home Foundation Summit in Dublin. We gathered salaried staff, community members, and top contributors for three days to connect and collaborate. The energy was electric, and we ended up hacking together our new open audio standard, Sendspin, in the hotel lobby!
Around the world in 82 ways
Turns out, great things happen when we come together in person. And our 2025 Community Day events really drove this home. We had 1,600 community members gather across 82 in-person events around the globe to connect, exchange ideas, and share their love of open source smart home projects.
All of which was organized by our incredible volunteers who continue to give their own time to work on something they believe in 💪 Their contributions are why formalizing our relationship with volunteers became a priority for 2026, but that's not all…
Investing in community
The community is the heart of our work, and in 2025 we took concrete steps to reflect that. We set the plans in motion to launch our new Community department – creating a proper home within the foundation for the people who make it what it is 🎉 We also introduced our Community Sync meetings, creating an open forum for developers, contributors, and smart home users to provide input into the planning of major projects.
In 2025, we found more ways to meet face-to-face than ever before, and we're already planning what's next. Connecting with users, volunteer developers, and everyone passionate about the open smart home matters deeply to us; not just to meet you, but to create opportunities for you to shape your home on your own terms. We can't wait to see more of you soon.
So much more to report
Last year was a year of change – and we've only scratched the surface in this blog. The report reveals the bigger picture: the governance changes, the community programs, the challenges we struggled to finally overcome, and our ambitions for 2026. Dive into the 2025 Annual Report for all the details, and see what's possible when we rally around a shared mission.