Why The Smart Home Bubble Popped | Hackaday

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Circa 2015 or so, it seemed like you couldn’t move a finger without being bombarded with ads and articles about ‘smart homes’ and the ‘internet of things’ — all of which would make our lives so much easier and more automated. Fast-forward a decade and this dream has mostly evaporated along with many of the players in the space. Why this happened is the topic of a recent video by [Caya].

An interesting bit of context that the video starts off with is that home automation really kicked off back in 1975, when the X10 protocol and related devices using power lines for signaling began being sold. These fully integrated solutions generally worked reasonably well, but what all changed when the IoT and ‘smart home’ craze kicked off and brought with it an explosion of new standards.

Over the past decade we have seen the concept of a ‘smart home’ collapse into a nightmare of abandoned IoT devices, subscription services, forced ads, privacy violations, and an increasingly more congested 2.4 GHz spectrum that everything from WiFi and Zigbee to Bluetooth and others ended up competing for, with a corresponding collapse in reliability of data transmissions.

As raised in the video, a big issue is that of the financial viability of running the remote services for a smart home solution, even if this is the part that should make it as plug-and-play as a 1990s-era smart home solution. To the average user setting up their own locally hosted smart home solution isn’t really a straightforward option.

Although at the end [Caya] demonstrates using Home Assistant (HA) as a locally hosted alternative, this is still not something that a non-techie will be able to set up or maintain. Even if you shell out a cool two-hundred clams for the Home Assistant Green plug-and-play hardware solution, the average person will be lost the second any of the prescribed steps in provided documentation do not work. Woe to whoever is the person who is ‘good with computers’ in those cases.

Ultimately another problem with ‘smart homes’ is that they’re really not that smart, as you can definitely set up all kinds of rules in HA and similar solutions, but this is more painstaking manual automation with all the excitement of programming PID controllers. Having an actual intelligence behind the system that could react to what’s happening would make it a far easier sell, yet which is where all the ‘smart assistants’ like Alexa keep falling flat.

Currently [Caya] has set up his HA-based lighting configuration to be used by OpenClaw ‘agentic AI’, as a way to add some actual ‘smarts’, but it’s telling that he hasn’t integrated the smart lock of his apartment into the system yet. Nobody wants to have the OpenClaw agent tell you that it ‘cannot open the front door’ for you, after all.

104 thoughts on “Why The Smart Home Bubble Popped”

I still like my alexa for lights, timers and other simple things but no way am I shopping with it. That’s where their dreams of profit fell through.

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There should be a rule that for any given HAD entry, there is a corresponding XKCD. In this instance, 1807 applies:

https://xkcd.com/1807/

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"Alexa, set a recurring 3 AM alarm of horror movie sounds"

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Even still using it for the lights puts you into a tiny percentage of people who still use that thing. It’s been years since I heard anybody anywhere talking to an Alexa, but the last time I heard it I distinctly remember it feeling about as anachronistic as hearing somebody hock a loogey into a spitoon indoors.

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It seems anachronistic because it is. No one wants to take 30 seconds to say something that a 0.5s button press can do.

As someone who also uses plenty of smart home stuff. Set it up to be seamless and quick to use. Using it shouldn’t be its own activity.

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Oh there are plenty of times I’d want to, and that is just because the hands are dirty or the switch is annoyingly far away and the floor is likely booby trapped if I’m busy. So if you had real mobility issues etc…

Never actually used one though, as I’d never want to use an external product for such features – I dislike having as much to do with Amazon, Google etc as I have, but its so so inconvenient to try and avoid these behemoths entirely.

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it was a solution looking for a problem..

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Bizarre ableist comment. Lots of people still use voice control, its benefits for the less mobile are obvious

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That would be the tiny percentage they talked about. I have mobility problems, yet I don’t expect everyone to consider me in their comments. If you don’t have mobility problems you probably won’t consider them. Expecting everyone to do that is what’s bizarre.

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The downfall of alexa and other such services was always the set of skills. Things like...