People are increasingly installing smart devices into their homes, but when someone new moves in, technological poltergeists persist.
People have been making their homes smart with off-the-shelf parts for well over a decade now. Sometimes they sell those homes, and the new homeowners find themselves mired in troubleshooting when they should be trying to pick out wall colors.
Some former homeowners will provide onboarding to the home’s smart home system, but most do walk away and leave it as an adventure for the next person.
This is one area where real estate laws need to catch-up. Any existing products in the house need to have a way to have the ownership passed to the new owner.
TOO MANY CHOICES
Making sense of what to buy in the first place also brings its own challenges. Chaos reigns at every step in the smart home purchase process, and you can easily end up with a pile of devices that don’t work together.
Even the relatively simple act of playing music across multiple smart speakers involves a mess of proprietary protocols.
BEYOND THE BASICS
Over time, as people continue to improve their homes, they’ll see opportunities to upgrade to connected devices and build out their home network... it's probably true, in the sense that people will slowly amass patchworks of gadgets in the same way that I have over the past few years. But the original promise of the smart home wasn’t merely about automating a handful of random tasks.
Companies such as Amazon, Apple, and Google were instead supposed to provide a kind of central intelligence for the home, tying together an array of devices in clever and delightful ways. The idea is that a smart alarm clock would know to open your blinds and turn on the lights in the morning, or that your sleep tracker would know to turn the thermostat down when you’re not resting comfortably.
Today, those companies are still figuring out exactly how to do all that. Google Assistant is still trying to replace features that Google’s Nest devices once offered on their own, such as Home- and Away-based automation routines. Apple still has two separate interfaces for home automation—one through its Home app, and another through Shortcuts. Amazon still maintains three separate smart home systems through Alexa, Ring, and Blink. Only recently have all three tech giants agreed on a single wireless smart home protocol, which would reduce the number of bridges and hubs people have to install.
It’s all just so hopelessly confusing right now, and it’s probably not going to get better anytime soon.
