I personally think that the 'smart home' is a very good concept and has great potential - and can bring benefits even today. This is specially true if you are n

I personally think that the 'smart home' is a very good concept and has great potential - and can bring benefits even today. This is specially true if you are not neurotypical or have any issues (like forgetfulness). I often forget to do thinks like turn off the coffee machine. My automation ensures that this is done(either by timer, or when I leave the house), that the security system arms when I'm off the house, proper lights are turned on and off, that the robo vacuum won't start until my 3d printer is done printing (it will also turn it off), will turn on air filters when the air quality drops, etc. That said, the state of the industry is ridiculous. Wifi is extremely convenient and the way to go (IMHO) for the vast majority of devices. It's not well suited for some battery powered sensors due to power constraints - Zigbee works, so does Bluetooth LE. Or everything could just use Bluetooth for all I care. But those protocols are not the problem (despite the industry trying to push CHIP or whatever the new name is). No, the problem is the software. The insistence on doing stuff in the Cloud when there's no reason to do so. All the incompatible protocols and setup hoops one have to jump. All the political and monetary bickering that causes companies to deprecate 'integrations' or otherwise break functions. Look, most devices are a combination of switches (usually on and off, a freaking bit!), some numeric values coming from sensors. Maybe strings for good UX. That is it. How many different ways of flipping bits do we need? How complicated do we really have to make retrieving a device status or a temperature value? I just need to be able to read some simple values and flip some bits back in response - using an encrypted channel. That's it. IF one wants to do this over the Cloud to control stuff remotely, fine. Every single device with software from unknown provenance wanting to phone home - and then forcing me to try to get different clouds to talk to one another?! No thank you.