Why the Smart Home Bubble Popped

Summary

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 prob...