alt Hacker NewsAdd-ons (now apps) can't be done without HAOS. It's one of those non-obvious things.
There's other things I forget which are also more difficult/annoying to manage on the container version.
I have a rather large docker compose stack so my first experiments with HA were as running it there.
That lasted maybe a week before I went and ran it as a VM instead.
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Yeah, I ended up buying a dedicated mini PC ($100 refurb) to install HAOS on. HA is pretty much useless without being able to run add-ons. I run everything on k8s in my home server, I don't have a VM system set up and didn't want to bother just for HA. It's funny, the pattern of a central application that uses docker containers to add plugins seems like a perfect fit for a Kubernetes Operator. I suppose it still misses out on some of the advantages of running everything "on metal" for integrating with physical components like USB dongles.
Apps/add-ons is just another container, so you can add them manually in the compose file.
It's kind of silly since they're just containers it runs anyways. I'm sure there's other reasons. At least running it as a VM isn't too hard. Pretty easy to use their image and run from that.