Compared to NetHome Plus

Compared to NetHome Plus

You will still use the vendor app once, to put the units on Wi-Fi. This is what changes afterwards — drawbacks included, because several of them are real.

	NetHome Plus	Breeze Core + Breeze
Where a command goes	phone → the internet → Midea's cloud → back down to the AC three metres away	phone → your server → the AC, over your own LAN
Internet down	nothing works	everything works
What it feels like	you wait for the cloud round-trip on top of the unit's own response time	the UI moves the instant you touch it (optimistic + SSE), so the unit's own latency is the only real cost
Account	required, with whatever it logs	none — no sign-up, no e-mail, no ToS
Sharing with the household	pass the account password around	one credential per device, each individually revocable, each approved by an admin on the LAN
Automation	whatever the app happens to offer	documented REST API + SSE + Prometheus, plus server-side schedules and temperature curves
Where you can control it from	the phone app	phone, widget, car, browser, terminal, curl, cron
Beeping	every command chirps	off unless asked for — change the setpoint at 3 a.m. without waking anyone
Multiple units	one at a time	swipe between them; one screen each
Updates	pushed at you; features can vanish	you choose when, and a version that works keeps working
The AC's internet access	needed	firewall the units off the internet entirely once paired (Exposing it safely)
If the vendor sunsets it	you are stuck	nothing to sunset; your machine, your source

A word on "faster"

The slow part is not the network — it is the AC's own firmware. On the maintainer's units breeze-core diag measures roughly 0.7 s for a full state query over the LAN, and no client can beat that. What self-hosting removes is everything stacked on top of it: the WAN hop, the cloud queue, an app cold-start, and outages you can do nothing about.

The honest drawbacks

• You need a machine that is always on, and you are now its sysadmin — updates, and a copy of config.json and devices.json somewhere safe.
• Pairing is not fully local. The units get onto Wi-Fi via the vendor app, and V3 units need one internet-connected discovery run: msmart-ng fetches each unit's token and key through the NetHome Plus cloud. Everything after that is offline — keep those credentials backed up.
• Nothing is exposed to the internet by default. Away-from-home control means a VPN (recommended) or a reverse proxy you secure yourself.
• The feature ceiling is your firmware's. Only what msmart-ng and your model support: some units silently ignore horizontal swing, and there is no filter reset, no firmware updates, no energy dashboard.
• The native app is Android-only. iOS and desktop get the web panel, which is good, but it is not an app. (There is a Flutter client plan for changing that.)
• It is sized for a home — one worker, one scheduler. Handfuls of units, not a building.
• If the server is down, the app is down. Your IR remote never stopped working.
• No voice assistants out of the box. No Alexa or Google skill; you would bridge it through the API yourself. See Voice assistants (plan).
• Give the units static DHCP leases, or they will wander to new addresses.
• It is not a home-automation platform. One brand, one job, no ecosystem.