You Don’t Need a Middleman in a Smart Home
One of the themes of CES 2024 was “making the smart home easier.” Home Depot reintroduced its smart hub called Hubspace , and OliverIQ introduced itself as the first smart home as a service. What they have in common is that they both cite certain pain points of the smart home process as their driving goal. For Hubspace, it’s the cost of smart home devices and the need for many apps, while OliverIQ points to confusion in setup, smart devices not always working with each other, and general problems with maintenance and automation. These aren’t unfounded concerns either, but after looking at both services, I’m not entirely sure they deliver on the promised value or address these issues. In fact, I think you’re still better off if you follow some simple rules of the road.
The idea of ”smart homes being simplified” means that we’re really at the point of mass adoption of smart homes in general, and that seems like a good thing. Home Depot is no stranger to the smart home space—they were one of the few places to purchase smart products when the first products started rolling out. They take all of their own brands like Husky and Hampton Bay and provide connectivity for those devices and then provide the Hubspace app that connects them easily. OliverIQ is a monthly service you can purchase from a plumber, electrician or cable technician to install, monitor, repair and connect your smart home devices. You can’t purchase it directly from OliverIQ; you will always contact your service technician, who will charge any price or may provide it for free. Although the approaches are different, both want to take some of the work out of your hands, and I believe you’ll be better off if you do it yourself.
Setting up devices is getting easier
First, we should start with the idea that creating a smart home is difficult. It aims to do just the opposite, and over the past eighteen months I’ve noticed devices connecting faster, easier, more consistently, and being disconnected from the network less often. While Matter’s adoption rate isn’t as fast as we’d like, the reality is that it’s widespread enough across most smart verticals to help. The QR code for setup, used by most Matter and Thread enabled devices, simplifies the process. Hubspace also uses QR codes to set up pairing, but the service also lacks Matter, Thread, Zigbee and Z-wave. It only works with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and Bluetooth is only for setup. This means that even if Hubspace makes it easy to get set up, it doesn’t future-proof you and makes you overly dependent on Wi-Fi. OliverIQ can handle the entire installation process for you. However, this could mean calling customer service every time you want to install a new device or reconnect, which for service providers seems like a way to create a new revenue stream.
The best idea is to choose one smart home hub before your first smart home device – choose Apple Homekit, Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Of course, there are other hubs (like SmartThings), but few have as much support as these three. Then choose products from larger, more established smart home brands that support Matter and Thread and install them yourself. For example, although there are many smart plugs available on Amazon; choose from famous brands such as Phillips, Meross, GE, Aqara that work with this hub or do online research before purchasing. This may seem like an additional burden, but you probably do the same research before purchasing any appliance. We will continue to review and provide reliable advice on these issues here at Lifehacker.
The real smart devices we all use are getting cheaper all the time.
The next premise of smart homes is that these products are too expensive. Sure, we’re writing about the expensive smart grills and vacuum cleaners unveiled at CES , but the reality is that the smart devices most of us buy, be they light bulbs, wall switches, or vacuum cleaners, aren’t significantly more expensive than their untethered counterparts, and the prices they are small. over the past ten years, as a rule, accounted for these products. There is now a giant ecosystem of brands and this competition has driven prices down, aided by rapidly advancing technology. Ten years ago, a plugged-in light bulb might cost $70; now it’s less than $10. The upside to Home Depot’s plan is that their products won’t be exclusive to Hubspace—they’ll still work with Google Assistant and Alexa, so we’ll all benefit from them making more of their product line connected, even if those products are included Wi-Fi only (again, choosing Matter, Thread, Zigbee and Z-wave means you’re not always relying on the cloud).
To avoid this problem, choose products that will last you for many years, using the latest standards and providing great lifetime value. Also, build your smart home slowly, choosing smart home products only to solve an existing problem. If you’re annoyed by lights that are always on, investing in sensors and smart bulbs will solve the problem. While I appreciate that OliverIQ will recommend both products and automations based on customers’ home setups, I was not impressed with the solutions themselves that were mentioned when I spoke with the CTO and found them attractive. He used the example of suggesting a timer for smart garage lighting, but a smarter solution would be to use a sensor or trigger device to alert the light whether someone is actually in the room or not. Obviously, anything that results in a service technician having to come to your home will also mean increased costs.
No middleman will save you from a multitude of applications for smart devices.
An annoyance we all have with smart home technology, and one I’ve mentioned many times, is having a bunch of apps on our phone that should just hang around in the background, especially for low-end devices like light bulbs and plugs. Over the past year, I’ve gradually realized that I’m not entirely sure Matter will solve this problem, that granular control over devices will likely still remain in a dedicated app rather than a hub like SmartThings or Alexa. The hub will allow you to turn the bulb on and off and dim it, but probably won’t affect color or movement. I also don’t foresee all of the robot vacuum cleaner’s control functions being accessible from the hub. If Home Depot can save me from having to install the Hampton Bay app, the Husky app, and the Ecosmart app, that would be a nice benefit, but we’ll have to see if Hubspace can actually deliver all the functionality of the individual apps with a user interface that’s quite usable. Speaking to OliverIQ, who also place most devices under a white label for the service provider you bought from, they admitted that they can’t actually prevent the need to keep the original apps on a customer’s phone – ultimately they can only To work with the integration technologies that each company provided, they could simply hope to leverage their eventual customer base to gain access to integrations that other companies could not obtain. I found this premise unlikely, given the large user base of most brands and that loss of integration was often due to security issues rather than a lack of users.
To avoid having a million apps on your phone, the only real answer is to work with fewer brands. Find one company that you buy all your light bulbs from. If they also offer forks and sensors, even better. Otherwise, accept your fate. Use a folder on your phone to dump all the apps there if they bother you.
Removed services and new applications cannot solve the most common problems with connected devices.
The biggest problem for me as a smart device user is that connected devices often go offline. Sometimes this happens here and there, and the problem resolves itself with an update. More often than not, the connection is simply lost, and all smart home super users know that the only solution is, at best, a factory reset, and at worst, a factory reset and reinstallation. Neither service can solve this problem, although OliverIQ hopes to work around it through regular monitoring and driver updates. I’m sure this will solve the problem, but ultimately you won’t be able to turn off the device remotely or reset and reinstall it. OliverIQ will try to diagnose this remotely, but if they can’t do that, they will send the service provider a ticket to do so, which means the service provider has to get to that ticket, respond, and possibly exit. This takes time and may incur additional costs. Of course, we can solve most problems with money, but I don’t think that will help sell a smart home.
The reality is that living in a home with any gadgets or appliances means learning at least enough about them to keep them in working order and then calling in reinforcements for major repairs. I’ve been thinking a lot about how companies like Comcast are working with customers to solve why their Wi-Fi isn’t working, using AI bots to help you troubleshoot problems, how they’re turning to phone technicians to work with you one on one, and ultimately about whether they will send someone to their home, and how incredibly painful that process is even after millions of dollars of research have been poured into it. At some point, everyone will benefit from learning how to unplug a device and plug it back in.
These services can exploit and alienate the people who would benefit most from them.
Finally, what both services don’t say, and neither do I, is that I believe they are aimed at older or less tech-savvy users. While no one wants to spend Thanksgiving explaining to grandpa how to wire a light bulb, I believe you do it more efficiently than a Home Depot employee on the phone from the customer service center. You’re also not trying to sell Gramps anything, and these services are just that. Ask anyone who has outsourced their legacy technology to services like Geek Squad about the results, and it will tell us how services like OliverIQ might work. First of all, it is a source of income for service personnel; you will not have a direct relationship with OliverIQ.
Hubspace seems harmless enough as a smart app, but it forces users to rely on Home Depot. While I’m glad to welcome Home Depot to the fold, I’m left with a bitter feeling from the endless interactions I’ve had with them over the last ten years when trying to purchase connected devices. At many of the places I visited, the employees seemed to be completely uneducated about the very smart technologies they were selling, and often admitted to me that they had not received any training in either the smart technologies or the products. I have often heard employees tell customers misinformation about products in order to sell them, and even recently when purchasing appliances, I had to correct my salesperson several times on statements they made about smart appliances I was looking at. Will Hubspace be a full-fledged education program for employees and customer support?
The point is that smart technology isn’t just about self-satisfaction when the blinds automatically open at dawn and the coffee maker says good morning. They play an incredibly important role in accessibility, meaning that older people and people who are less tech-savvy are actually the people we really want to be able to use smart technology. I’m just not sure that intermediaries will help do this.