There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
I agree. I have no interest in relying on my phone to work door locks, outside lights, thermostats, or curtains. I just don’t see the upside.
Not sure about “relying” on it. But, it is something cool while also being a luxury and possibly an energy waster. That said, I have a Siri controlled lights on underside of kitchen cabinets. I can just say hey siri, countertop off or countertop on. Perhaps many years from now it will be more common for people to have this kind of thing.
It could really be much easier to use if they have a true standard that lasts - think blue vga monitor cable here, look how long that lasted and still goes on.
I’m not sure I would want a ton of devices in my house though. Do I really want lights turning off and on by themselves by walking around or from phone? Doubt it.
Speaking of Matter struggling…does anyone have LiFX Br30 Matter enabled bulbs successfully working with the home app? Mine continuously go “no response” requiring me to delete all eleven bulbs from LIFX and Home app. Then add back. They always work in LIFX app. They have rock solid WiFi with ubiquity access point within 15 ft line of site of all bulbs. Home app just drops them out randomly. I think it’s when the active home hub switches to a different one. Unfortunately, this is an Apple problem and they just point at LIFX. LIFX points at ubiquity and Apple. Thoughts?
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
I agree. I have no interest in relying on my phone to work door locks, outside lights, thermostats, or curtains. I just don’t see the upside.
My thermostat also can be managed via my iPad in addition to my phone.
That’s one of those use cases that I really wonder why you would do that. I bought a programmable thermostat ~10 years ago. I programmed it when it was first installed and other than changing batteries every couple of years I have never had to do anything to it. People keep talking about how great it is to be able to adjust the temp from their phone, especially when they aren’t home. I simply don’t ever need to do that. My thermostat takes care of itself.
Do you understand what you're saying, "because *I* can't see utility in this, it's useless." Maybe put the mirror down.
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
I agree. I have no interest in relying on my phone to work door locks, outside lights, thermostats, or curtains. I just don’t see the upside.
My thermostat also can be managed via my iPad in addition to my phone.
That’s one of those use cases that I really wonder why you would do that. I bought a programmable thermostat ~10 years ago. I programmed it when it was first installed and other than changing batteries every couple of years I have never had to do anything to it. People keep talking about how great it is to be able to adjust the temp from their phone, especially when they aren’t home. I simply don’t ever need to do that. My thermostat takes care of itself.
Do you understand what you're saying, "because *I* can't see utility in this, it's useless." Maybe put the mirror down.
With all due respect - “smart” WiFi thermostats are a waste of time and money. They are cute, but a programmable thermostat effectively saves money just like a “smart” thermostat does. And, without security concerns.
Am I so lazy that I cannot go to the thermostat to change something if wanted?
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
I agree. I have no interest in relying on my phone to work door locks, outside lights, thermostats, or curtains. I just don’t see the upside.
My thermostat also can be managed via my iPad in addition to my phone.
That’s one of those use cases that I really wonder why you would do that. I bought a programmable thermostat ~10 years ago. I programmed it when it was first installed and other than changing batteries every couple of years I have never had to do anything to it. People keep talking about how great it is to be able to adjust the temp from their phone, especially when they aren’t home. I simply don’t ever need to do that. My thermostat takes care of itself.
Do you understand what you're saying, "because *I* can't see utility in this, it's useless." Maybe put the mirror down.
With all due respect - “smart” WiFi thermostats are a waste of time and money. They are cute, but a programmable thermostat effectively saves money just like a “smart” thermostat does. And, without security concerns.
Am I so lazy that I cannot go to the thermostat to change something if wanted?
Well, or if you are still five kms from home and want to adjust the temp before you get there.
From my experience Matter is super finicky. I have a good number of Matter devices, and recently they all went offline. Not a single one is accessible in Apple Home. I did update one of my Apple TVs (the most recent 4K) with the Latest Public Beta of TVos 18. I do not know if that caused the issue, but I have since unplugged it, as there is still no way to not have it be selected as my home hub. It didn't help. The complications of Thread on top of the Matter protocol, and it just feels like it is all unfinished. Things used to work fairly consistently with Apple Home, but the introduction of Thread and Matter have changed that, and not in a good way.
The 18 and 18.1 betas (and 17 before it) have been particularly rough in the interconnectivity department. It’s consistently messed with systems in my house that were previously rock-solid. Bluetooth has less hiccups in the 18.x betas than the 16/17 ones did, but there still there. Especially with headphone connections. WiFi is also tweaky. It sometimes sees networks, sometimes doesn’t (that are perfectly visible to devices running 17.x or earlier).
I was really hoping that Matter and Thread would start to make things better, but they’ve genuinely made them worse, at least in the short-term. It really just kinda sucks.
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
Maybe for the knockoff brand and their lack of adequate security, but I have full trust for HomeKit devices. Never had nor heard any sort of security exploits. Ex, Nest doorbells have been full of problems and sharing leaks, whereas HomeKit Secure Video is E2EE and Apple isn’t sharing it.
In that case perhaps the irony of your post hits new records!
You say 'knock off brand' and I can only assume you mean Huawei which is the go-to target of your self exploding darts.
Huawei has had a Whole House Smart Home solution for years now. It's now approaching version 5.
A full install can reach $22,000.
On top of its own products, it has almost 5,000 partners producing almost 6,000 smart home products.
You can visit Home Experience areas at many of its stores. You can even buy cars at those stores.
A swathe of high speed mesh system options which can use PLC backends or FTTR (using both 'invisible' surface mounted fibre or robot installed wall fibre) to handle the traffic.
Housing development companies can pre-install the systems during development of properties.
"As the real estate industry undergoes profound adjustments amidst the rising tide of intelligence, a cross-border integration revolution is imperative. Yu Liang, Chairman of Vanke Group, and Richard Yu, Executive Director and CEO of the Consumer Business Group of Huawei, understand this well. They aim to join forces beyond the traditional development market to tap into the trillion-dollar blue ocean market of smart buildings and digital home industry ecology."
The smart home concept extends to things outside the home like cars so you can video call your home TV (yeah, Huawei has a full range of real TVs) and voice control the smart home while you drive home. The TVs have gesture control so things like raising your finger to your lips will activate the mute function.
We are already in the IoT era (both Industrial and Consumer) so IoT chipsets are now available and with security in mind. Same with the OS.
"The system's security microkernel has achieved CC EAL 5+, the highest level of security certification for a consumer device OS globally."
Huawei HiSilicon offers a range of IoT chipset options for smart devices and then there is the logic to weave everything together (Open Harmony and HarmonyOS).
So. Who is knocking off who?
Apple has always had a problem with commitment.
It should see things out so that users can feel comfortable with investing in third party products that can enjoy long term support at OS level. And it should 'just work'.
Apple has made a few errors along the way with regards to its smart home efforts.
Discontinuing support for new router products. Requiring a HomePod or Apple TV for some use cases. Licencing costs. Disbanding the AirPort division.
We can point the finger at many areas but Apple only has itself to blame if it felt the need to run with Matter/Thread.
Why couldn't it persuade enough of those 1.5 billion users to jump onto the concept?
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
Maybe for the knockoff brand and their lack of adequate security, but I have full trust for HomeKit devices. Never had nor heard any sort of security exploits. Ex, Nest doorbells have been full of problems and sharing leaks, whereas HomeKit Secure Video is E2EE and Apple isn’t sharing it.
In that case perhaps the irony of your post hits new records!
You say 'knock off brand' and I can only assume you mean Huawei which is the go-to target of your self exploding darts.
Huawei has had a Whole House Smart Home solution for years now. It's now approaching version 5.
A full install can reach $22,000.
On top of its own products, it has almost 5,000 partners producing almost 6,000 smart home products.
You can visit Home Experience areas at many of its stores. You can even buy cars at those stores.
A swathe of high speed mesh system options which can use PLC backends or FTTR (using both 'invisible' surface mounted fibre or robot installed wall fibre) to handle the traffic.
Housing development companies can pre-install the systems during development of properties.
"As the real estate industry undergoes profound adjustments amidst the rising tide of intelligence, a cross-border integration revolution is imperative. Yu Liang, Chairman of Vanke Group, and Richard Yu, Executive Director and CEO of the Consumer Business Group of Huawei, understand this well. They aim to join forces beyond the traditional development market to tap into the trillion-dollar blue ocean market of smart buildings and digital home industry ecology."
The smart home concept extends to things outside the home like cars so you can video call your home TV (yeah, Huawei has a full range of real TVs) and voice control the smart home while you drive home. The TVs have gesture control so things like raising your finger to your lips will activate the mute function.
We are already in the IoT era (both Industrial and Consumer) so IoT chipsets are now available and with security in mind. Same with the OS.
"The system's security microkernel has achieved CC EAL 5+, the highest level of security certification for a consumer device OS globally."
Huawei HiSilicon offers a range of IoT chipset options for smart devices and then there is the logic to weave everything together (Open Harmony and HarmonyOS).
So. Who is knocking off who?
Apple has always had a problem with commitment.
It should see things out so that users can feel comfortable with investing in third party products that can enjoy long term support at OS level. And it should 'just work'.
Apple has made a few errors along the way with regards to its smart home efforts.
Discontinuing support for new router products. Requiring a HomePod or Apple TV for some use cases. Licencing costs. Disbanding the AirPort division.
We can point the finger at many areas but Apple only has itself to blame if it felt the need to run with Matter/Thread.
Why couldn't it persuade enough of those 1.5 billion users to jump onto the concept?
Excellent post. Hopefully others won’t be triggered by the Huawei reference and will understand the essence of your multiple points. I’ve been involved on both sides of the equation, from proprietary standards, to commercial standards with a large network of partners to open standards and initiatives like Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0.
I understand what you’re saying about Apple’s of commitment but I think that part of that is their (chosen) lack of domain expertise in these areas. Apple is absolutely capable of going deep in any area they want to but I believe they wanted to put more focus and resources in the areas that they can dominate either quickly or over a relatively short period of time. Truth be told, Apple is already branching out into areas that are further from where they’ve gone before, like content creation, but there is usually a logical reason for doing so or there is a traceable lineage to Apple’s current and earlier successes.
The slow pace and relatively small third party partner commitment to HomeKit plus their weak efforts in being a system builder with a core connectivity and controller hub didn’t leave Apple with a solid foundation to build on. HomeKit is, in my opinion, still way too product focused. But guess what, Apple is a product company with some complementary services wrapped around it.
Apple jumping into Matter in a big way at this point in time makes sense for Apple. Lacking a solid system focus HomeKit will continue to get eroded by all the open standards based solutions rising all around them. Maybe Apple will carve out a niche for HomeKit and go into a gateway model, with a HomeKit Island but I think they’d be better off getting their own engineers and architects actively engaged in helping to make Matter good enough to meet Apple’s needs.
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
That’s very simplistic
But true……There is no trust.
Maybe for you, but I fully trust my smart home devices. They all work reliably every time. Of course I can get up and turn on each light individually, but it's just much easier to tell Siri to turn them on. The best thing about smart light switches is by turning them on in the dark using Siri. Also, I prefer to control my thermostat myself, instead of the thermostat controlling itself. If I'm on the other side of the house, it's just more convenient to say "Siri set thermostat to 84°" which effectively shuts it off so that it doesn't run. I have bought clunkers in the past (August Smart Lock, Logitech Circle View) but now all of my devices work consistently every time. I think whether or not the device works well or not mostly depends on the device manufacturer. Lutron for example has worked reliably every single time since I installed them 4 years ago. Most of the time I just turn the light on or off at the switch, but but if it's all of the lights or groups of lights, it's just so much simpler to tell Siri to do it. I currently own and love Lutron light switches (15), Ecobee thermostat & video doorbell, and Schlage Encode Plus using Thread instead of WiFi.
Matter is a step in the right direction but unfortunately it allows two transports, WiFi and Thread. So if you pick up a Matter on Thread device and you don’t have a Thread hub at home (HomePod 2nd gen, HomePod mini or a new AppleTV with Thread) it won’t work. While there definitely is a need for simplification and WiFi for IoT devices is a bad idea (power, limited addresses, security…) Thread is nowhere near the nirvana that was promised. Its range is worse than WiFi, ZWave and Zigbee 3. It’s, in one word, crap. Pinning the hopes of the new Matter standard on this awful transport is sadly very shortsighted.
Why only name 2 devices with Thread support? All kinds of devices are coming out with it from all kinds of different companies like Google and Amazon for example. Before long the majority of households will have Thread Border Router equipped devices without even realizing it. It is absolutely not crap. It’s essential in my opinion. The Schlage Encode Plus has 2 options available. WiFi and Thread. Using Wifi, you get maybe a couple of months worth of battery life versus over a year of battery life using Thread. I chose Thread because I don’t want to keep changing batteries every couple of months. That’s why my August Smart Lock turned into a Dumb Lock. I got sick and tired of changing batteries all the time so I reverted back to using it as a normal lock. WiFi is way too power hungry.
Also, you want to call it a hub, which gives people the wrong idea. My Lutron light switches for example require a hub. But the hub is only going to work with Lutron devices, which means that it will not work for every WiFi smart device. Companies all have their own proprietary hubs so you could end up with several different hubs in your house. A Thread Border Router built into any product on the other hand will allow any thread supported device from any manufacturer to work. Also, a hub is a completely separate device and its only job is to act as a hub versus a Thread Border Router is built into various products. So you won’t necessarily even realize that an Amazon Echo even contains a Thread Border Router for example. It’s not a separate device that only acts as a router. That’s a huge difference.
I have a lot of HomeKit devices. Recently I bought a switchbot 2 hub that runs on matter, with the hopes it would help incorporate some IR controlled devices into the mix. Instead, the switchbot appeared to instantly add instability to my whole setup. Maybe it was coincidence, but I’ve since removed the switchbot device. I like the idea of a broader standard, but I like the idea of everything working without fiddling better.
For similar reasons I took the hit and replaced all my Wemo switches and plugs a couple of years ago. They were constantly dropping offline, or worse, bumping other things offline. It became a complex puzzle with multiple variables. For a time, I had a spreadsheet with device info and data from my router as I sought to isolate the problem, thinking maybe one hinky device was creating a cascade of address mismatches and failures. Finally, I gave up and bought Leviton switches and plugs to replace all the wemo items I had early adopted.’ Once I replaced them all, everything was stable. Voice commands and automations work instantly and reliably. I don’t want to give that up for something more loosey goosey. I bought into the Apple ecosystem specifically because I don’t want to have to tinker with things under the hood in order to ferret out problems and come up with obtuse workarounds.
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
I agree. I have no interest in relying on my phone to work door locks, outside lights, thermostats, or curtains. I just don’t see the upside.
Many years ago, before iPhones existed, I had an X-10 switch for my porch light which let me turn the light on from a remote in my car. That let me see the door lock clearly. Several moves later, I have porch lights with motion sensors, no need to turn them on remotely. I have one HomeKit capable switch with a desk fan in the basement. I have a stationary bike about 8’ from the fan - when I get warm pedaling, I turn on the fan from my phone - works great. If someone hacks in, they can turn the fan on and off - so what? That’s my only use case for automation in my 110 year old house.
Thermostat has a schedule, don’t need to change it remotely. As for door locks - only need to open them when I’m physically there- opening them any other time would be a catastrophe. Sure, someone could pick the lock, much easier to open an electrically operated lock if it’s been hacked. Pretty sure that will be possible eventually.
As for remotely controlling thermostats, I believe the only safe approach would be to only switch between pre-defined home and away settings. Limits how hot or cold your house can get if someone manages to hack in.
Lots of other fun uses for automation, such as lights, but I’m not interested in those.
There is simply no trust for smart home devices. No thanks.
I agree. I have no interest in relying on my phone to work door locks, outside lights, thermostats, or curtains. I just don’t see the upside.
My thermostat also can be managed via my iPad in addition to my phone.
That’s one of those use cases that I really wonder why you would do that. I bought a programmable thermostat ~10 years ago. I programmed it when it was first installed and other than changing batteries every couple of years I have never had to do anything to it. People keep talking about how great it is to be able to adjust the temp from their phone, especially when they aren’t home. I simply don’t ever need to do that. My thermostat takes care of itself.
Comments
Am I so lazy that I cannot go to the thermostat to change something if wanted?
I was really hoping that Matter and Thread would start to make things better, but they’ve genuinely made them worse, at least in the short-term. It really just kinda sucks.
In that case perhaps the irony of your post hits new records!
You say 'knock off brand' and I can only assume you mean Huawei which is the go-to target of your self exploding darts.
Huawei has had a Whole House Smart Home solution for years now. It's now approaching version 5.
A full install can reach $22,000.
On top of its own products, it has almost 5,000 partners producing almost 6,000 smart home products.
You can visit Home Experience areas at many of its stores. You can even buy cars at those stores.
A swathe of high speed mesh system options which can use PLC backends or FTTR (using both 'invisible' surface mounted fibre or robot installed wall fibre) to handle the traffic.
Housing development companies can pre-install the systems during development of properties.
"As the real estate industry undergoes profound adjustments amidst the rising tide of intelligence, a cross-border integration revolution is imperative. Yu Liang, Chairman of Vanke Group, and Richard Yu, Executive Director and CEO of the Consumer Business Group of Huawei, understand this well. They aim to join forces beyond the traditional development market to tap into the trillion-dollar blue ocean market of smart buildings and digital home industry ecology."
https://longportapp.com/en/news/108256197
It is not limited to China either.
The smart home concept extends to things outside the home like cars so you can video call your home TV (yeah, Huawei has a full range of real TVs) and voice control the smart home while you drive home. The TVs have gesture control so things like raising your finger to your lips will activate the mute function.
We are already in the IoT era (both Industrial and Consumer) so IoT chipsets are now available and with security in mind. Same with the OS.
"The system's security microkernel has achieved CC EAL 5+, the highest level of security certification for a consumer device OS globally."
https://developer.huawei.com/consumer/en/doc/design-guides-V1/introduction-0000001077467612-V1
Huawei HiSilicon offers a range of IoT chipset options for smart devices and then there is the logic to weave everything together (Open Harmony and HarmonyOS).
So. Who is knocking off who?
Apple has always had a problem with commitment.
We can point the finger at many areas but Apple only has itself to blame if it felt the need to run with Matter/Thread.
Why couldn't it persuade enough of those 1.5 billion users to jump onto the concept?
While there definitely is a need for simplification and WiFi for IoT devices is a bad idea (power, limited addresses, security…) Thread is nowhere near the nirvana that was promised. Its range is worse than WiFi, ZWave and Zigbee 3. It’s, in one word, crap. Pinning the hopes of the new Matter standard on this awful transport is sadly very shortsighted.
That's great, but everyone is not you.