As we head into another gifting season and more and more connected devices make their way onto gift guides, I want to offer a cautionary note. The smart home is like a cat — mostly self-sufficient and nice to have, but also possessing a mind of its own that can lead to frustration and confusion for its owner. Indeed, when you gift or get a connected device, ownership turns into active participation with the device and various other ecosystems.
What do I mean? Three weeks ago, three of my devices stopped working — all for different reasons — and required different steps to fix them. This week, one device suddenly start working again, another connected after some initial struggles, and a third became so intrusive I had to move it to another room.
This isn’t a device or brand problem. It’s an industry problem. Smart home products look like hardware but are really software, subject to updates and changes that will break integrations, contain bugs, and add new, unwanted features. For most consumers, there’s a gap between what they expect from hardware and what they get with smart home devices that leads to dissatisfaction, returns, and poor user experiences.
For the manufacturers, there’s a lack of tools and/or research to ensure that software updates don’t cause problems or that new features don’t frustrate users. I’ll offer up a few examples of fussy devices to illustrate these issues. Let me be your cautionary tale before purchasing a smart bulb or speaker.
I’ll start with a feature set shift that has led me to banish my Echo to the storage room. Amazon is one of the biggest players in this sector, introducing tens of smart home products a year and holding a leadership position with its Alexa digital assistant. But in the last month, Alexa has become so chatty — offering me a stream of recommendations, notifications, and discovery tips — that I finally put my Echo in the storage room.
I have complained about Alexa getting too proactive before, and had turned off as many of the options that led it to make suggestions in my Alexa app (here’s how to do that), but she just kept talking to me. In the last three weeks, Google has made one unsolicited suggestion while Alexa has made at least five. Two of these were emergency alerts for slow-onset flooding in my area, which I had to go in and turn off.
I didn’t even know Alexa tracked minor National Weather Service bulletins and alerted customers, much less when that feature was added. And it’s frustrating to have a device behave differently without foreknowledge, especially if the new function interrupts me with non-essential information while I’m working or reading.
Another disappointment has been my Nanoleaf Elements, which are actually one of my favorite products. I had long had them on a schedule where they would turn on at 7:30 in the morning and off at 9:30 at night. About a month ago, I noticed they would turn off randomly during the day, so I checked the schedule in the app to make sure it was still correct. It was.
Then about three weeks ago, the lights started turning on in the middle of the night, waking us up. It was like living with a ghost. We finally started unplugging them at night to avoid the random wake-up calls. At that point, I tried changing the schedule, then I hard reset the device. My husband was frustrated with me. I was frustrated with Nanoleaf. The devices stayed unplugged.
Then I got a software update and applied it. The random schedule deviations stopped, but a day later I saw I had the option to update the lights to work as a Thread Border router. Excited, I applied the update. And then my lights stopped working. Nanoleaf suggested another hard reset and said an upcoming software update should fix the issue. It has been a week, however, and they are still broken.
Software updates break devices all the time. But in this case, there’s a lack of communication and an element of surprise associated with a product that costs a lot of money (my Nanoleaf setup cost almost $1,000) as well as an element of random misbehavior that the consumer can’t fix and for which they can’t find answers. In this case, forums, maybe a Discord channel, and the ability to roll back bad software updates would probably help consumers feel a bit more informed and in control of their homes.
My final example of fussy devices addresses the challenges of making a device work within an ecosystem. I have two WeMo outlets powering lights over my plants that are tied into my Google Home ecosystem. They’re scheduled to turn on at 8 a.m. and off at 8 p.m. in the Google Home routines setting as well as grouped to turn on or off when I tell Google to “Turn the plants on” or “Turn the plants off.” Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it will tell me it doesn’t work, via notification or voice, when in fact it’s working just fine.
Just for kicks, the last time it stopped working, I decided not to fix it. In all honesty, I was just sick of messing with it, so I procrastinated and manually clicked the outlets on and off at approximately the right times. This approach enraged my husband, who kept asking Google to turn on the lights and kept getting error messages and no light.
But this morning it started working again. Sort of. The schedule is now turning on my lights on time and my requests to Google turn the lights on or off work. But…Google is also still sending me notifications to both the display and my phone informing me that there is a problem. Why? I don’t know. Why did it stop working for two weeks and then suddenly start up again with no input from me? I don’t know.
Usually when my WeMo outlets misbehave I factory reset them, delete them from the Google Home, and then set everything up again. It takes about 15-20 minutes and isn’t hard, but it’s also not something I love doing. But this time I just waited and it fixed itself. Or maybe it didn’t?
I used to spend about two hours a week tweaking elements of my smart home, in part because I was constantly changing out devices and running multiple networks that were talking to different hubs. I have streamlined my home’s devices and yet I still spend anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes a week dealing with devices that suddenly change their behavior or refuse to act like they are supposed to. It’s like living with annoying, high-maintenance ghosts. Or a cat.
I’m not calling out Amazon, Nanoleaf, WeMo, or Google because their devices are bad; there are plenty of other brands that have provided similar trouble. But I do think it’s worth warning people before they find themselves in too deep. The industry has come a long way, but in the end, owning a smart home still involves a lot of time spent doing the equivalent of herding cats.
WeMo stuff has been among the least reliable for me. They randomly lose Wifi connections and don’t respond even in areas of very strong signal.
My Ring stuff is slightly more reliable, but live view is about a 50/50 proposition. That’s just awful and totally unacceptable.
I’ve never had a single issue with Hue stuff and very few issues with my Honeywell smart thermostats.
This was a great column! I particularly liked:
“Smart home products look like hardware but are really software, subject to updates and changes that will break integrations, contain bugs, and add new, unwanted features. For most consumers, there’s a gap between what they expect from hardware and what they get with smart home devices that leads to dissatisfaction, returns, and poor user experiences.”
As an engineer, I would have to say that there’s also a very important hardware piece, but inarguably after the first few weeks almost all the annoyances come from software issues until the hardware piece reaches end of life. (For example, my Eve Aqua sprinkler controls, which all began leaking a few months out of warranty. That one was a hardware issue.) But in between the “What’s a neutral wire?” Beginning phase and the end of life breakdown, the issues are nearly all software, and, as you point out, often caused by unexpected and all too often undocumented software changes.
Even Alexa, normally a household favorite, has done this on occasion.
For a couple of years, one of the last things I do at night is say, “Alexa, turn off your display” to make the screen go dark. Earlier this month, something changed, and now I have to say, “Alexa, turn off your screen.” No warning, no documentation of the change or the new phrase, which we only found by trial and error. It’s an easy enough change, but it’s definitely annoying to be surprised by something which worked literally hundreds of times before.
Absolutely on target. My Alexa devices used to work with multi room music synchronization, but they haven’t worked correctly, or at all, in several weeks. I’ve spent time with tech support on the phone – at least they’re reachable! – but they’re clueless. I’ve given up on synchronized music. And the unsolicited “advice” is infuriating. Fortunately (so far!) the light switches still work. But I only have Alexa speakers, an August lock which I hardly use, and Ring cameras and doorbell. I’m keeping it simple, as such things go.
Same, Alexa and Spotify broke about a month ago and after doing all the “fixes” for over an hour, it’s still broken. The one killer app, and the really only reason I like Alexa is dead. How about that drop in feature, oops we forget to tell you it takes over a minute to connect?
My lights turn on sometime in the morning but only downstairs. And my lifx lights despite the again BS “fixes” still play a scheduled dimming at 1 AM if they are on. Mind you the dimming is more like a roller coaster where they dim and then go back to full light for a second then dim again.
Look it’s simple, the bar is set high for reliability, if you can’t make your crap reliable just don’t. Seems like someone should make a reliability and interoperability review/website.
Just wait until Matter, when you have to hunt down if it is Google or Apple or Amazon or tuya or smartthings or whoever else can issue commands to your devices that is the problem.
This is why ZWave is not going away. No cloud servers to cause chaos, no unannounced “updates”, no undocumented services. Simple devices obedient to one controller.
ZWave – “and no way to easily move devices to another hub”. Unlinking/linking is a mess. Not exactly the future I’d hope for.
Cringe to say, how I love Wink’s ability to copy/send z-wave information. I was able to take my entire zwave network from my old Intermatic Master Controller and copy it to Wink Hub.
It depends on which hub you use. SmartThings Is a certified Z wave controller, but with a very significant cloud component that can break zwave device functionality with unannounced and undocumented changes.
They are in the middle of a transition to a new platform which will run more things on the hub itself, called SmartThings Edge, but it still requires unique code (called Edge Drivers) and those can still get updated and pushed out without advance notice.
The same is true for some other Z wave hubs from other brands, although obviously not all. But just the protocol itself isn’t enough to insulate you: it depends on the platform architecture as well.
Or got with Tasmota. No hub. Everyone has wifi. Done. Also Lutron has a rock solid system with caseta
There’s no such thing as the Cloud, just other people’s computers.
If you truly want smart home, you’ve got to have full local control with intelligence on the devices.
Amen to this.
That’s why I host Home Assistant and use wifi devices like Shelly or Tasmota. Not once have I had either go down.
Want a reliable smart home, turn off automatic updates, don’t install new updates until others who enjoy the bleeding edge have flushed out the bugs, don’t buy cheap products from brands you’ve never heard of and the controller must be local not in the cloud.
Hi. My name is Greg and I am an IoT user. [All: “Hello Greg”] I would hazard a guess that these type of issues are the norm for “smart” home devotees. For a technology that purports to make our life simpler and enable us to have more free time to allocate to self-fulfilling pursuits, we have become a society controlled by and addicted to various tech-based time-wasting opportunities. The future awaits.
None of these issues with Zwave or Zigbee that are all local control. 🙂 I have had my Nanoleaf Essential bulbs sitting on my desk for a few months now since Ive only had thread with apple home. Might be time to get an Eero set for Color Friday.
Clearly you never tried to unlink a “Smart Things” (lol) device…
Despite misgivings (I had the same fears of what you’re describing here), 2 years ago I configured a fully automated home driven by an Apple HomePod. I’ve been surprised at how reliable and not-chatty Siri is, and it works seamlessly with my iPhone.
THANK YOU! More people need to say this out loud. Getting our August smart lock to work has been and continues to be an ordeal! What is the point of a smart device that saves me seconds but requires minutes to do what it is intended to do every time I use it?
Then again we as consumers are to blame just as much as product manufacturers. Everyone always wants the latest and greatest, eagerly signing up for betas and prelaunches to the point that many ‘production’ products are now essentially in perpetual beta.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you will beta test this product.
And this is why I love Phillips Hue. I have literally trashed everything else including wemo. It always just works and litterly never had an issue other then someone accidentally turning off a light switch. I will agree with you on Amazon Echo. Its getting close to getting unplugged. Litterly the only thing we use it for light control and you usually have to repeat yourself 2x because she doesn’t understand.
Apple Home integration with Hue is very good now – with my Apple Watch I can easily control rooms, individual lights, and so on.
Echoing your thoughts experiences back. Some smart devices are ruined by the cloud. I’ve opted for a hybrid approach . It’s more work but has been highly reliable. Offline with local network support. There are 2 useful projects: Tasmota and node-red
“Only Local Control” but how do you interface with your wavebees, I’m not seeing any exposed programming interfaces on that minimalist white eero let’s go look at the product description maybe it pops open….. NOPE, pushed updates.
This 100%. Sometimes it feels like every convenience comes along with an equal and opposite frustration. The times my Hue lights don’t pop on when I’m approaching home, there’s no way to figure out what the problem is, so I have to stop, get the app out, wait for it to connect, toggle the right switches…
And it’s not always just bugs, either! I set up my front door on Alexa to grab the Ring status of the door and then tell Hue to turn on the overhead light – that way if I’m leaving after dark, my front stoop is illuminated. Most of the time it works great. But the way that Alexa schedules work, you can only set up the hours “per calendar day,” so I had set it up turn on the light if the door opens from sunset to midnight. Then a friend left a little after midnight and the light didn’t turn on, of course. So I have to go in and set up a new schedule – midnight to sunrise. So not only did the light not work when I needed it, but I had to put in extra work to fix. There’s nothing “wrong” with the system, it’s just – as the title of this blog says – unbearably fussy.
On a side note to “You should be allowed to control the software run on your devices” back in October the Smart Home community received a little gift from the Library of Congress, a lovely addition to the “Jailbreak” class of exceptions to the DMCA, we are allowed to use software to add or remove any legally obtained software to any legally obtained and or accesed “voice assistant device”. Also granted were changes to the Repair & Maintain (but not unlock locked features) catagoy of exceptions, adding home appliances and “Home Systems”.
You totally slept on these.
Excellent article, and spot-on, Stacey!
Just this week, I’ve had to re-establish my Wyze connection in the Google Home app on two separate occasions. I have over 50 connected devices through Wyze, so you can imagine how inconvenient it was that Google Home suddenly could not “find” Wyze! Grrrrr.
And I consider myself a power user. I was able to correct the situation, but can’t imagine someone else in my family, who just wants the stuff to work tolerating this!
Ran a tech podcast in Minnesota (in CA now) and knew one of the SmartThings (ST) founders. During an interview I gushed over the ‘promise’ of ST and went all-in and made my house oh, so smart.
After moving to California four years ago, all of my ST devices and hub are still in a box ($1,200 worth of hardware). I just couldn’t deal with, as you describe, the fussiness of a smart home any longer and having everything “kinda, sorta” work and be reliable. When I think of all the hours I invested in setting up sensors, changing batteries, updates to the hub, outages and more, the payoff never arrived.
I finally decided to have a handful of Hue lights that turn on and off via HomeKit — and separate apps for my MyQ garage door and Kwikset front door lock — and leave it at that. Now I hardly ever fuss with any of this stuff anymore and life is better.
We have all sorts of Google Home compatible devices (my favorite is Tailwind, by far) but the one that enrages us the most is Google speaker’s music capabilities. They are a complete mystery and keep changing.
Take the one in my five-year-old’s room, which she uses to get to sleep at night (it plays a lullaby on repeat). Getting that to work, on repeat, all night takes an insane amount of trial and error. 99% of the time, it works. The two percent: it stops repeating, apparently goes on to another Youtube channel (or Youtube Music station), and starts playing 80s electro-pop at full volume.
My daughter comes running in while Haddaway is yelling “WHAT IS LOVE?” at 2am … it’s all disturbing stuff.
On top of this, the devices that are indispensible but likely aren’t money-makers get discontinued. Like, Nest sensors, which alert you if a window or door is open. They’re great! And no membership needed! Sadly, discontinued. :/
I too have noticed how my smart home experience has gotten worse over the past two years. I’m particularly baffled by how inconsistent Google Home routines have become, with no rhyme or reason for any particular routine to fail. Heck, I’ve literally given the same voice command to the same Nest mini speaker on a daily basis for the past year (like “play the Frozen soundtrack”) and I still get different response or action every other time (where Google assistant plays a random public Frozen playlist from YouTube, or a foreign version of the soundtrack, rather than the expected English Frozen OST). It’s the very definition of insanity!
I wandered in here because this article appeared in my Google News feed. I read a lot about “Smart Home” devices and I have come to the conclusion that they largely serve to diminish rather than improve one’s quality of life; they’re often value subtracting. And what’s the upside of spending an hour per week fidgeting with a light switch other than to involve Amazon and Google in my lighting decisions? These kinds of devices aren’t “home automation,” they’re “home systems outsourcing.”
I’m a smart home enthusiast and have had my share of frustrations as well especially with Nanoleaf products. I have 2 — the original triangle light panels as well as the square ones (“canvas”, as they call it). I have a lot of trouble getting them to work well with their own app. There are times that I just go into my Google Home app to turn them off because I can’t do it through the app.
Pro tip: I’ve found success with the open source, local network smart home service, Home Assistant. It’s solid, configurable, and extensible. Plus, it makes it easy to get smart home products without committing to a single ecosystem (e.g. Hue, Lifx, Homekit, SmartThings, etc). Plus part 2, you set up many custom dashboards that are exposed to your local network as a webpage, allowing you to use old phones/tablets as more UI-friendly smart home control devices .
I have the same problem on my wemo plug adapter. I tell Google to turn off the light, and then it tells me it couldn’t connect to the light just after it turns off.
I develop and write my own devices. Hardware and software.
Some of them monitor other products to ensure they’re still working and connected.
Web interfaces, telnet, cloud… all the tricks are there, just no beholden to Muck Zipperburger, apple or their friends.
They never go offline (they have diverse backup strategies), or want to download extra features that I don’t want. They just work. I haven’t even tweaked any functionality for more than six months.
No subscriptions or advertising.
Of course there’s no tether to the IoT gods, so they don’t have any hold over what I see or do.
Maybe I’m old fashioned… I’m over 60.
I’m 65 and I use Home Assistant running in a container on a Linux server at home. No Alexa, no Google, no clouds.
It puzzles me why so many young intelligent people end up struggling and fighting the phenomena known as “build it obsolescence”.
All these devices are made to fail deliberately, controlled by cloud servers directly connected to the Google and/or Alexa bank account.
Merry X-mas, everyone.
How you going to write this article without mentioning Matter, which in theory, may resolve all/a lot of these issues.
Because Matter isn’t here yet, and we don’t know exactly how or if it will solve some of these problems. Matter is only going to provide a limited set of features for a limited set of devices. We don’t even know how things will actually interoperate, so it’s premature to say it will or will not solve these issues.
I had issues recently with my wemo plugs also, and it’s not the first time, either. I’m convinced it’s with their servers, and just waiting them out is the least aggravating solution. Actually, I deleted one of my plugs but was never able to get the app to recognize it again. However, once they fixed their issue & everything was back up, the wayward plug still responds to schedules & commands despite it being invisible in the app, so…
This hits so close to home for me, literally. I’m a programmer, I started automating my house as a covid hobby, got into great detail with the HomeAssistant system (which itself is one of the good products in the industry.) Heavily invested in Google home as my voice assistant. The bugs and lack of options are ridiculous. Silent mode is a must, I don’t need you repeating you just turned on the tv I asked you to. My Smarthings network is definitely haunted. It is impossible to answer the Nest doorbell with my phone before the person is gone. It also identified me as a “person or possibly an animal”. Possibly shouldn’t even be in the vocabulary of a smart device. I keep going because I enjoy the successes and tinkering with things, but its not ready for the average consumer. Grandma should stick to the Clapper for now.
This article speaks to me! We have been having similar issues, Our old nest thermostat kept going offline and several TP-Link kasa devices work only intermittently. Or just like your wemo, they work but we still get error messages and it’s frustrating. I upgraded our router and nest and that helped but still some errors.
You know, you could have just said “Alexa, stop giving me tips”
Thank you for validating my existence.
Most of this problems comes with a poor WiFi setup in a smart home. A good WiFi set-up is the key for o good working smart home. Another thing that makes smart homes less reliable is people using a lot of different brands and making then talking to each other. Amazon, Google or any other assistant will never be a reliable hub for home automation because they never talk directly to your devices(except some ZigBee stuff) it’s always better use the device app to make your automations. So keeping your smart devices in the same brand/app will always give your a better experience. I used to have many different brands and I had a lot of this problems…devices were very slow to react my commands, sometimes didn’t even work. So I decided that I would stick with 1 brand(tuya) and I can say that all the frustrations are gone. I choosed tuya because they are very reliable, cheap and they have a lot of different devices.
Really? I can’t believe you all have so many issues. I run my own home on HomeAssistant, which links to devices over MQTT over local Wifi.
Maybe it’s due to my network being completely local, but I rarely if ever have issues with it. Even the few cloud devices I do have, such as my Neatos or the Chamberlain Garage Door Opener work without any issues.
I minimized some issues by purchasing a commercial/dealer install system that I can add/modify the programming. Since purchasing X10 and other DIY systems and devices in the past, I had so many issues getting all of it to work reliability even using dedicated PCs and software for control, it was driving me crazy (thanks light for coming on a 2am while I’m asleep) but I saw the usefulness of home automation.
Currently, I have the main automation system and some other non-supported or don’t need to be integrated devices, separated. I just can’t stand having to use several different apps to control devices, so I stick with supported devices.
I’m hoping integration of different device manufacturers gets better when Matter is released, it’s stupid how some devices don’t even support a common protocol where it would be easy to be supported by different systems.
WEMO is just junk. I abandoned it years ago. https://www.mgraves.org/2017/01/ye-ha-nomo-wemo/
All this stuff is way to dependent upon cloud services. This is a problem. It should be locally executed. This fact drove me to use Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. Now most of our stuff still works even when our ISP goes down.
This was exactly what I meant by comment that current IoT offerings aren’t home automation but “home systems outsourcing”; just like outsourcing anything else, you’re trusting a service provider not only to be able to do something better that you can but also to turn a profit while doing it. This works great for dog walking and cleaning but breaks down in areas like turning off the lights or adjusting the water temperature in your shower. Again, there’s no reason why simple requests like this need to trombone across the Internet.
Sorry I’m a little late to this …
My background, been playing with ‘Smart Home’ tech with the start of X10 (late 70’s). I’ve used pretty much most of the stuff available (except the high end, installed managed HA). Went as far as writing a book on the subject of HA. I’ve built my own network and mixed various network and Smart technologies. My build is not a realistic build for any normal person (and a few of the engineering staff 😉 ). I also find the current crop of HA cloud services bizarre. Haven’t they heard about living on the edge? 😉 But I’ve not cracked how to build a consumer proof HA environment that I could sell without the cloud. :-/
First thing to point out:
HA/Smart tech works until it doesn’t work then good luck figuring out the issue. If you have mixed technologies, the vendor A will blame vendor B and you’ll still have the problem.
When a google product doesn’t work, who do you call? I haven’t found a number to call. I did find forums and chats but they send you off to ‘try something’. And now the issue becomes a multi-day issue where I need to schedule my life around the access to support.
Now will this get better with Matter (or whatever name it changes to next week)? I have no idea. I know they’re claiming to be as simple as a wall switch but an old fashion wall switch doesn’t need to be reboot or paired or upgraded. It just goes on or off or it doesn’t.