My Smart Home Is Broken on Purpose

This is my phone, and this is a folder I never bothered to name. Today, it finally earns one. Inside are over 10 colorful apps, and every single one of them controls something smart in my home. As you can probably guess, every single one needed a download, an account, a password, and of course, a learning curve. Now, some of them need decoding too. For example, RT-310i. What the... What? That app controls my winter thermostat. I have no idea what RT-310i stands for, and I've owned the thing for years. All I know is that if I forget which app or icon it is, I might be standing in a cold house in the middle of winter, scrolling through this folder, trying to remember the name of my own heating. And it gets so much better. Deco runs my Wi-Fi. Tapo runs my cameras. TP-Link runs my older cameras. And here's the fun part. Deco, Tapo, and TP-Link are all the same company. One manufacturer somehow needs three separate apps on my phone. Then there's Desk Control, which raises and lowers my desk. Gardena drives the lawnmower. Greeplus handles one of my air conditioners. And MelCloud handles another, because apparently, two air conditioners sharing an app would be too much harmony for one household. Rainbird waters the garden. Xsense watches the smoke. SmartThings exists purely so my Samsung TVs feel included. And HomeKit covers some of the lights, which thankfully, I don't need an IKEA app for. Honestly, if I dig deeper, I'll probably find more apps like these, where none of them talk to each other. 10, 12 apps or more. One house, zero cooperation. We build AI that writes code and drives cars. But my thermostat and my air conditioners, whose one shared job is temperature, have never exchanged a word. Senses are you probably have a smartphone. But not many of us have a smart home like the one we're about to enter, where almost everything is rigged to be controlled with a simple touchscreen. You see, the smart home was supposed to be the future. And this folder is what actually showed up. So instead of ranting about it, I wanted to understand why it's like this, because the answer turns out to be far more deliberate than I expected. By the way, if you end up enjoying this video, subscribe, because why not? Oh, and if this folder is giving you flashbacks to my I stopped renting my digital life episode, good instinct. That video is this one's older brother, and I'll link it at the end. Smart home gadgets are poised to be the next big thing, expected to exceed 36 million units in the next two years. So why is smart home still a mess in 2026? You see, all this mess came from dozens of industries crashing into the same space at roughly the same time, where none of them had any reason to cooperate. Security companies built cameras and motion sensors. HVAC manufacturers connected thermostats. Lighting companies made bulb, appliance makers networked fridges and washing machines, and every single one of them picked their own radio, their own cloud, and their own app. Quick radio lesson, because this really is the root of everything. Zigbee, a low-power mesh protocol built on top of an IEEE radio standard, became the favorite for battery-powered sensors. Z-Wave did roughly the same job, but on a different frequency with its own alliance. The two never actually spoke. Wi-Fi reached everywhere, but ate batteries for breakfast. Bluetooth was fine as long as you were standing next to the dang thing you were trying to control. Thread, a newer low-power mesh that speaks the internet's own language, arrived years later, after the battle lines were already drawn. These are incompatible stacks, physically incapable of talking to each other, and the hubs, bridges, and apps that grew around each one of them were designed to keep you in sight. By the time normal people started buying this stuff in volume, fragmentation wasn't a problem waiting for a fix. It was the architecture. Tell me about the Google acquisition. The mission is really to build a conscious home. Then 2014 happened, and it's one of those years that only looks coordinated in hindsight. Why did Google buy this company? January, Google buys Nest, the thermostat company, for $3.2 billion. June, Apple announces HomeKit. November, Amazon reveals Alexa and the first Echo. Within 10 months, three of the most powerful companies on the planet all declared that your house was the next battleground. Now, the comfortable version of this story is that the grown-ups finally arrived to clean up the protocol chaos, but that is not what happened. Each one of them came in with a very specific agenda. Apple wanted your home to be one more reason you never leave the iPhone. Google wanted the data, your routines, your schedule, when you're home, when you're not. And Amazon wanted a store in your kitchen. If there is an Echo on the counter and you run out of coffee, guess exactly where that order goes. For all three, the smart home was a distribution channel. And here's the uncomfortable part. Fragmentation is great for distribution channels. The more tangled and incompatible your devices are, the more painful it is to switch ecosystems, and the more likely you are to stay where you already are. Now, to be fair, they did eventually try to fix all this. December 2019, Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance announced a joint project called Connected Home over IP, later renamed Matter. Before the launch of Matter, we've been all kind of competing against each other, but that ended up creating a fragmented marketplace. One open standard that any device could adopt, regardless of brand or radio. The Zigbee Alliance rebranded itself as the Connectivity Standards Alliance to run it, and Matter 1.0 shipped in October 2022. Credit where it's due. The code is open source, and actually open, and that's a real progress for this industry. But here's the part the keynote slides skip. Shipping a certified Matter product means joining the Alliance, and the cheapest paid membership runs $7,000 a year, with certification adding thousands more per product. For someone like Amazon, that's a rounding error. For a two-person hardware startup with one clever device, it's a wall. So, adoption has been a need. Plenty of devices skip Matter entirely, and the ones that support it still don't behave identically across Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa, which produces exactly the kind of low-grade friction Matter was invented to kill. I personally think Matter is the right direction, but the delivery just hasn't caught up to the ambition yet. And here's the receipt from my own house. I went through my folder, app by app, checking what actually supports Matter. The cameras? No. The AC apps? The thermostat, the mower, the sprinklers, the smoke sensors, the desk, none of them supported. Depending on which light bulbs you count, the grand total of Matter in my entire home is somewhere between zero and a couple of bulbs. The best I've found? My router and, funny enough, my TVs can act as Matter controllers, so I own several remote controls for a language nothing in my house speaks. No matter the device we're talking about, one thing is clear. Every single one needs power. And the Nano Power Strip by Anker is a super clever desk approach. It clamps directly onto the desk edge. One hand? No tools. Silicone lined so it doesn't scratch. It fits any desk 15-45mm thick and holds firm once it's on. This is a 10-in-1 power strip featuring 6 AC outlets and 4 USB ports in dual-zone layout. The dual-zone spacing means a bulky smart home adapter in the AC zone doesn't block the USB ports next to it. Basically, nothing fights for space and everything is connected. One USB-C port delivers 70W, which is enough to charge a MacBook, so the laptop charger brick is one less thing to worry about and, of course, one less cable to route. Everything plugged in is also covered by 1500 joules of surge protection, so if anything goes wrong on the power line, the strip takes it over before the gear does. At only 0.75 inches thin and completely silent, this is the most elegant desk charging solution I've used so far. And I'll link it in the description. Now, back to the mess. While the industry was slowly sorting out this standards problem, it discovered a second business model, and this is the one that personally gets under my skin. Subscriptions. I have 6 TAPO cameras at home, and TAPO's cloud plan quoted me $120 a year to store their footage. Every year. Forever. For cameras already paid for. So, instead, I shoved an SD card onto every single one and gave TAPO, you know, partly it's the principle. The footage doesn't live with you. It lives in their data center. And looking at what your own camera recorded last night costs a monthly fee. But mostly it's simpler than that. Footage of the people I love sitting on someone else's server was never going to happen in my house. And I got off easy, because at least TAPO gives you the SD card option, which all I can say is bravo. Google's camera plan, which just got rebranded from Nest Aware into Google Home Premium, starts at $10 a month. $20 for the advanced tier. Ring's cheapest plan is $4.99 a month, and without it, your recording history simply does not exist. The camera streams live and remembers nothing. Arlo runs about $10 a month for a single camera, and $20 to cover them all. Add it up over a few years, and these subscriptions end up costing more than the cameras themselves. You're renting access to footage recorded by hardware you already, you know, purchased and own inside the house you already own. And if the company behind it ever decides the economics doesn't work, or gets acquired, or just pivots, that camera goes back to being a plastic box with a lens. I talk more about this whole renting mindset in my weekly newsletter, which I'll link above and in the description below. It's April 14, 2022. Insteel, one of the oldest names in home automation, switches off its cloud servers overnight. No warning, no goodbye email. The company had gone insolvent, and its users found out because their houses stopped responding. Users found out that something had happened when their little hubs have a red and green light, and all the hubs turned red one day. Hubs went dark, automations people had spent years refining just, you know, stopped as well. The service only came back two months later, and the way it came back tells you everything. A group of longtime customers pulled their own money and resources and bought the company themselves. You said a small group of passionate users had brought it together. I knew the people that could help bring the company back quickly. It would be very difficult for anybody else to resurrect the company as quickly as we were able to do it. I love this story as a story, but as a recovery plan for an entire industry, the users had to buy the company. It's terrifying. And that's the unwritten contract of connected hardware right now. You own the plastic. The function is on loan. This is the next generation of Alexa. She's powered by Gen AI. With the next generation of Apple Intelligence, I'm not sure there's a company in the world that has a larger AI investment. So where does this all go next? Well, the pitch for 2026 is, of course, AI. This February, Amazon rolled out Alexa Plus out to everyone in the state. A new agentic assistant. $20 a month or free if you have Prime. It chains tasks together, browses the web on your behalf, books things, buys things. Google, meanwhile, is retiring the old assistant on its speakers and replacing it with Gemini for home. And the promise this time is seductive because it's aimed squarely at my folder. An intelligence layer that sits on top of all the fragmentation. You say, turn everything off downstairs and the agent figures out which of the 12 apps owns which device. Nobody ever has to remember what RT-310i means again. I'll be honest. I want that. Part of me wants it badly, but looking at how it's being sold is a bit cringy. Alexa Plus is free with Prime, which means the agent in your kitchen is bundled with the store again. And Gemini's smartest home features live inside Google Home Premium, which is, and I had to double check this, the exact same subscription that used to be called Nest Aware. The camera built didn't go away. It got an AI upgrade and a new name. The unifying layer everyone is promising is another rented layer operated by the same companies whose incentives built my smart folder in the first place. Will those agents get really good? Probably. Will they solve the ownership problem? I keep going back and forth on this and I don't have a confident answer. What I do know is that it finally works as long as you keep paying to stay inside. It's not the finish line I've been waiting so long for. So what do you actually do today? Well, for me, the principle is the same one that landed on the NAS episode. Local control. If the command to turn on your living room lamp travels to a data center in another country and back before it reaches a bulb three meters away from you, that company is operating your house and you're borrowing the light switch. So when you buy new gear, prefer devices that support Matter. And the best version of Matter is the one that runs on Thread, a local radio mesh that lives inside your walls and keeps working even if your internet doesn't. Matter is the language. Thread is the network it travels on. Favor manufacturers that treat local control as a selling point instead of a dirty secret. Check before you buy whether the thing works without an account and without a cloud. The easiest way to test this is to download the app for the product you're about to buy. Also, treat cloud features like remote access, voice control, and video history as bonuses you can choose, never as the foundation your home stands on. And if you do want to go all the way like I am planning to do, there is a piece of software I kept running into from every direction while researching this episode. Home Assistant. It's free, it's open source, it runs entirely on your own home, and it speaks basically everything. Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, Matter, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. It's basically one dashboard for every device. No cloud required. Over 625,000 households run it today, and since that counter is strictly opt-in, the real number is probably much higher. It started as a one frustrated developer side project back in 2013, and since 2024, it's been owned by a non-profit. We are actually building an open source foundation, like a foundation that builds open source software for the smart home world. The Open Home Foundation, whose entire reason to exist is privacy, choice, and local control. Now, full transparency. I have not set it up yet. I've read a small mountain about it. I've watched people run entire homes on it, but my own install doesn't exist yet. You see, while preparing this, I discovered something that moved this from someday to I want to do it next week. Home Assistant runs on the NAS I already own. The DXP-4800GT can host it, so the same kind of box that ended my storage subscriptions can apparently end this folder too. If you want to see that experiment, including the inevitable, you know, face bombs that I'm about to hit, be sure to check my newsletter, because I'll be documenting my experience there. So, no, I don't think the companies building the smart homes are going to clean up this folder for me. The mess pays too well now. The fix, as always, has to start on my side. Buy open, prefer local, and let the cloud be a bonus instead of a landlord, because your house should keep working for you even when the internet doesn't. And if you're wondering where this whole philosophy started, it started when I pulled my entire digital life off other people's servers and onto a box that I now have full control over. That story is right here, and it's basically part one of the one you just watched. It's been an absolute pleasure. This is E, over and out.