I believe that option is going away. Too many people thought they could take said ipad with them and discovered their home didn't work anymore.
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I had read about that in another forum, and the upshot was that the new and improved feature of Home would only be available on the HomePod and apple TV, but that the "lesser" features would still be available via the IPad.
Since IOS16 isn't out yet, we will have to wait to be sure.
P.S. I have a person that I'm going to build a dashboard for. She has an IPhone, and her husband has an andoid. I was planning on getting her an IPad. Now I'm not so sure.
Maybe, I may just keep that IPad on IOS15, and never upgrade?
I do have an older laptop that I don’t use much
You lost me there at the end. There used to be an ease of use advantage to hoobs but the ui option added to homebridge fixed that. Is I think what you were saying?
Yes. I think HomeBridge UI was not always included (or at least I know my first attempt years ago didn't have it), but it's part of the regular installation and images now from what I can see. I believe HOOBS actually started as a fork of that UI, with the goal of making setup easier. Never tried it, since this is easy enough for me now. 
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I have researched it a bit and from what I can tell for a self-install the regular Homebridge with the standard UI is the way to go now. I could not find any reason for switching to HOOBS once I had Homebridge already setup and working.
Here is the instructions if you want to try and set it up on windows. It is pretty easy.
Once that's going you just need the Homebridge and HE integration plugins. I would recommend this one from tonesto7.
If you want your windows machine to auto-login when you boot, official tool from Microsoft
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There is a pre-built image for Raspberry Pi (Getting Started · homebridge/homebridge-raspbian-image Wiki · GitHub) that really simplifies getting it up and running with the Homebridge UI if you go the RPi route.
Ive heard all kinds of things about home assistant. Like that it’s amazing if you understand what is going on and how to work with it but that it needs constant maintenance and tweaking. And from my understanding, homebridge is just home assistant for iOS. So does homebridge share the same need for tweaking and maintenance that home assistant needs?
Not exactly.
I have two homebridge instances running (one for each Hubitat). I haven't updated either in over a year and a half. Basically, they do what I need them to do:
- Allow me to bring Hubitat devices into the Home App
- Allow my to bring my Apple Calendar events into Hubitat
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Home Assistant is more equivalent to Hubitat, it can control your whole system. Some people use it in place of another hub, some people use it together with Hubitat or other hubs.
Homebridge basically just sets up a "fake" iOS hub/bridge device that can talk to the iOS homekit system. This lets you add all sort of devices to HomeKit without needing official Homekit integrations, Homebridge does the integration part for you. Now you can add a bunch of plugins to it as well and add other devices in a one-way fashion to iOS only. Most people on here probably have the majority of devices on Hubitat and just use Homebridge to share those out to iOS through Homebridge.
Not really at all, once I got mine going properly the only thing I ever do is apply updates when they come out and I have never had anything break or stop working on me.
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The only devices that I don’t have in Hubitat are my Ring Doorbell and Camera. I think the OP had said something about being able to view camera feeds in the Apple Home app and with the Ring plug-in for Homebridge this works brilliantly.
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I did the same thing. Not perfect but it works good considering Ring's API is unofficial and reverse engineered.
Also the Nest (thermostat) Integration on Homebridge works better than trying to send the Hubitat integrated thermostat over. So I have it integrated in Homebridge using the plugin there, and Hubitat using the community app.
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So then does homebridge take the place of a HomePod mini or Apple TV as the hub that my phone talks to?
Not really. Homebridge will "talk" to HE and HomePod/AppleTV. Homebridge really acts as a gateway between the Apple Hub (HomePod/AppleTV) and Hubitat. Hope this makes sense.
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Technically, you don't even need a HomeKit "hub." You can run HomeBridge and integrate Hubitat devices just fine without one; the tradeoff is that you will not be able to view and control your devices remotely (just when you're on the same LAN) or set up Automations in the Home app (which, for example, you will need if you're doing this to use any "workarounds" for HomeKit devices you want to control from Hubitat that lack a native integration). I believe live video in Home also requires a hub, though Hubitat of course will not have any such devices.
But no, HomeBridge does not take the place of a hub. It works similarly to how the Hue Bridge integration works in Home: it shows up as a "bridge" that lets you integrate multiple other "real" devices through this one bridge device. Hue bulbs only talk to Home through the Bridge. Same idea here, just with Hubitat devices (or whatever else you put into HomeBridge). If you want a hub, you still need a supported Apple device to do that (nowadays I'd only recommend a HomePod or AppleTV; even though iPads are still fully supported on iOS 15, I've always had bad luck with them, and you'll miss out on whatever the new Home hub features are in iOS 16).
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Now Homebridge won't bring apple connected devices back to Hubitat correct? You need some other way to do that?
Correct, there is no good way to do that besides the good old virtual switch trick with rules in HomeKit. The only thing I do this for is for presence, as it is 100% reliable through homekit.
Sorry I totally forget I have this Homepod Mini sitting here. Homebridge itself will work locally only. If you want remote access you need to add a HomePod or Apple TV that will act as a gateway so you can talk to the Homebridge system while not at home. I originally started with no gateway, and then setup an old iPad but apple is actually phasing that out now. I eventually got a HomePod mini on sale at Costco to use for this. I just put the Homepod in my office and I can use it for voice control or music or whatever just like an Alexa.
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So you don't get status back on hubitat then 
Are you just using your phone for presence?
If the device is integrated from Hubitat > HomeBridge > HomeKit, if you turn on/off in Homekit it has to go back through Hubitat to get the device to make the change. So the hub certainly knows about that. The only cases you cannot integrate back to Hubitat is HomeKit only devices or if you add an integration directly to Homebridge itself with a third party plugin, not via Hubitat sharing to Homebridge.
I mainly setup Homebridge to get the presense from phones yes, but once I started working on it, that's the only "Dashboard" I use now. So much faster to load and navigate since it is native to the OS. The Hubitat dashboards are only used on my PC for troubleshooting stuff.
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