In today’s situation where “the foreseeable has happened and will certainly happen again,” smart home company Insteon, which has an ecosystem of devices Insteon built around its proprietary communication standard, shut down its servers without warning. For nearly two decades, Insteon used to offer smart light switches, dimmers, relays, various sensors, thermostats, and more—the usual home automation stuff, all wired into one comfortable system. Looking back at the history of the Insteon subreddit, there are signs that the company has been in decline for a full half a year, but things have been mostly stable — until about a week ago, when users woke up and noticed that part of their smart home network stopped working, the mobile app No longer responsive, the company’s resources and infrastructure fail. More importantly – C-level management has deleted their LinkedIn profiles and no longer mentions Insteon and SmartLabs (Insteon’s parent company).
Instantly, the Insteon subreddit came alive. People are rightfully outraged at being kept in the dark, and they’re looking for answers — as if mocking them, and Insteon’s homepage claims all services are up and running. Others, anticipating closures eventually, began collecting and rehosting rapidly disappearing documents, while helping each other maintain technology and finding alternative platforms. It turns out that users don’t factory reset their Insteon hubs, because as part of the initial configuration, these hubs must communicate with the current Inste-Gone servers and make an effort to verify the SSL certificate. Sadly, quite a few users, unaware and going through the usual solutions to restore their network functionality, are now left with basically bricked hubs, save for a lucky few.
Modem that can connect the Insteon network to the Raspberry Pi – its original price was $80
After a week of service outages, Insteon released an update that surprised no one and didn’t fix a problem users didn’t know about. Blaming the pandemic for the company’s financial slump doesn’t even offer any solutions for those most affected. Proprietary parts of the ecosystem — code, certificates, and documents — are stuck firmly on the brink of reckoning, and it’s clear that people who rely on Insteon to keep their homes afloat cannot foresee a return to normalcy.
Users have been moving forward, and open and closed smart home platforms have been welcoming Inste-off refugees. HomeAssistant made an introduction to reassure users and support their migration to different platforms. They even currently have dedicated developers working on improving Insteon’s documentation and software integration – users are already sharing their HomeAssistant migration success stories! Other platforms, such as HOOBS, OpenHAB, and HomeSeer, have followed suit. The Raspberry Pi shortage doesn’t help, and the integration isn’t perfect, but they appear to be miles ahead of users’ expectations and light-years away from the broken system they’re stuck with. Of course, the mobile platform is not the only problem to be solved. Why does this kind of thing keep happening? Why do we keep returning to the smart home model backed by proprietary technology? What should we do differently so that this is no longer possible in the future?
Every now and then, another smart home system’s infrastructure is shut down, leaving its users in limbo and their hardware stack rendered useless. Even big companies aren’t safe — we saw Google-affiliated Revolv in 2016, Charter (known as Spectrum in the US) in 2020, and Samsung SmartThings in 2021. When Best Buy shut down its smart home offerings for a short period of time, we had an in-depth conversation about why that happened and the lessons we had to learn. After all, it’s not just smart home systems that are prone to this — even devices like prosthetic eyes.
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