Morning everyone; and hope all is well in your part of the world; nice and mild here today and forecasters are promising us an Indian summer this upcoming week, so fingers crossed! A few alarm bells in the smart home space this week to read into:
Delays Matter!
As you know I’m sure by now; the smart home space has organically grown over the years. And is evolved into a mismatch of technologies and protocols that need to be figured out. There was great excitement and there still is amongst smart home enthusiasts and installers when a new common standard was announced in recent times. The standard is called Matter, which is a little weird but grows on you eventually. Anyway, they’ve been working away on a specification on the background for a number of months now and general expectations were to have Matter certified smart home devices available by Christmas 2021. It now looks like we have a delay until 2022. Nothing overly surprising on delays and we wish them well in crafting a single standard for the smart home of the future.
All the details about the delay can be found here.
Not So Popular HomePod
A new report has validated that Amazon and Google still dominate the smart speaker market. By inference, the Apple HomePod mini remains a very niche device, with limited success in terms of sales. This is a bit of pity, as they’re pretty cool speakers. In fairness, Apple did decide to cease production of the larger HomePod and this didn’t exactly instill confidence in their smart speaker aspirations. Check out some more interesting reading on the state of the smart speaker marketplace here.
This Weeks Blog Post
When you decide to switch to a smart home, comfort and convenience aren’t the only things you’re thinking about. You want to ensure that all your central hub and smart devices incorporate total privacy in their functions. The Hubitat Elevation Smart Hub was created for that exact purpose. Not only is this hub among the best and most reliable ones in the smart home industry, but its commitment to privacy is like no other. The company believes that you shouldn’t have to put the convenience and security of your smart home in the hands of the internet or any company that you are not sure about its continuity. You want to ensure that you can still access your private data with or without the company, and keep running your smart home in any way you wish. Since the start, Hubitat has been committed to ensuring that they keep their smart home solutions for their users 100% local.
>> Read the complete article on the blog
Arlo Probs
Arlo, a pretty big brand in the smart home space; reported some outages recently. In general; most functionality was retained including the companies new home monitoring service. The issue surrounds the ability of homeowners to add ‘HomeKitify’ to their new devices. So a limited number of users were affected; did a quick check on Twitter and couldn’t track down a recent update; assume all is well. As a side note, Arlo provides some excellent smart home devices. A few more snippets on the story here.
Weekly Smart Home Voice Command! 🎤
Hey, Google, turn off the kitchen lights in 10 minutes
This is it for today, See you next Sunday 😉. If you have colleagues, friends, or neighbors that would benefit from knowing about smart home devices, please consider sharing them.
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– Gerard