Your smart home hub won’t last forever. It might be due to the hardware dying or becoming outdated, or because your smart home provider pulls the plug. Whatever the reason, you need to be prepared.
History is littered with dead smart home hubs
The pattern keeps repeating
The graveyard of smart home hubs is surprisingly full. There is a long list of smart home hubs that went from being useful tools for controlling a smart home to expensive paperweights.
Revolv smart home hubs that were sold with a “lifetime” subscription became bricks after Google acquired the company and then shut it down. Insteon’s servers literally went dark overnight, leaving users unable to access the cloud authentication they needed to sign in to their hubs. Wink didn’t shut down but did something almost as bad; it started charging for features that had previously been free.
Most of the people who bought these smart hubs probably imagined that they’d get years of use out of them, but that didn’t always turn out to be the case. A smart home hub that is in perfect working order can be rendered useless if the necessary support is removed.
- Dimensions (exterior)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself.
Why smart home hubs can disappear
Even big companies aren’t safe
Proprietary smart home hubs can have high associated costs. They need cloud infrastructure, regular security updates, app maintenance, and constant development to support new devices or protocols. This all costs companies a lot of money.
It can reach the point where supporting smart home hubs stops being financially viable, at which stage the simplest option is just to pull the plug. Alternatively, other revenue streams need to be found, such as Wink’s move to a paid subscription.
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Just because your smart home hub is sold by a big brand doesn’t make it immune. Sometimes, it can make things worse. It would be interesting to know if the Revolv smart home hub would still exist if the company hadn’t been bought out and then shelved by Google, for example.
This isn’t to say that every smart home hub is in immediate danger of being abandoned. The reality is that it does happen, and you need to not only be aware of the fact but also ready to deal with the consequences.
How to build a setup that can survive
Don’t become too reliant on one service
The best way to make your smart home as bulletproof as possible is to ensure that it doesn’t rely solely on one specific cloud service or proprietary hub. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you’re in big trouble when someone takes the basket away.
Perhaps the safest option is to opt for an open-source platform such as Home Assistant. The free smart home software doesn’t rely on any cloud services or branded hubs; it’s self-hosted, so you can run it on anything from an old laptop to a mini PC. Since you’re hosting the software yourself, even if Home Assistant suddenly ceased to exist (which is highly unlikely), your smart home would still keep happily chugging away on your own hardware.
Home Assistant also makes it easier to use devices with local control. That means that you don’t need to rely on any cloud services to use your devices; there are plenty of examples of cloud-based smart home devices being bricked, too.
If your smart home isn’t reliant on any services that live outside your home network, then it should be pretty robust. Smart home companies may die or shut down their cloud servers, but your local smart home setup should remain largely unaffected.
Be prepared for your smart home hub to die
Have a plan in place
Even a local smart home hub won’t last forever. I’ve been running Home Assistant for years, and it’s lived on several different devices, including an old laptop and a Raspberry Pi, while it’s now running happily alongside multiple other services on a mini PC.
At some point, you’re going to need to get a new smart home hub, whether through choice or necessity. The key is to be able to get your new smart home hub up and running as quickly as possible.
The most effective option is to take regular backups. With Home Assistant, for example, you can set up a new device as your smart home server, restore from a physical or cloud backup, and have your smart home working again before you know it. If you’re using a different hub, check whether it’s possible to use backups, exports, or migration tools that can help you get your smart home running again more quickly.
At the very least, you should keep some sort of documentation of your setup and your routines or automations. This can help you rebuild your smart home more quickly when it’s time to move to a new hub.
Smart home hubs don’t last forever
For whatever reason, your current smart home hub is unlikely to be your last. Your future self will thank you if you take the time now to ensure that you’re prepared for the change.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
