Buy based on protocols, and then focus on whether the bridges are trustworthy.
That is, be cautious about anything that will directly link to your wifi (and so doesn't need a bridge) unless you can confirm you can isolate them on their own wifi network or firewall them off should you feel the need to now or in the future, or anything that uses proprietary protocols where you can't rip out the bridge if the provider goes rogue.
Hue bulbs uses zigbee, so the bulbs themselves are not a problem. The bridge is. There are "dumb" zigbee bridges/interfaces, including USB controllers you can use with open source options like Home Assistant.
If you can't avoid a proprietary bridge, only buy what you can afford to replace, or where the device is still serviceable to a sufficient degree if you turn off/remove the bridge (e.g. Lightwave switches go "dumb" if you turn off the bridge, but still work), or if you firewall it (e.g. if you can still control it via wifi even if the bridge can't reach the internet).
Shelly [0] seems trustworthy enough. In any case, if they ever go full-on enshittified, as long as you don't update the firmware you should be able to keep using your stuff.
Anything you can flash Tasmota [1] on should be good to go as well. I believe that includes all or most Shelly devices as well.
my ikea stuff is pretty reliable, they seem conservative on adding features, but if you don't care about those specific features (which you probably don't) they've been pretty great, if not always the nicest design for the buttons/controllers.
Shelly seems very good so far. No need to connect it to the cloud at all, or use their app, since you can configure the via an onboard web UI (well, they'll still check for firmware updates when you connect them to Wi-Fi, but that's it). They can be controlled from Home Assistant completely without internet.
Of course, there's no guarantee for future products, but once they're set up they're not gonna change unless you go in and update their firmware.
From what I can see most of their products (all?) are z-wave, so even if they try to change as long as they don't break the z-wave support, you can buy a z-wave USB dongle and drop whatever wants to be directly connected to your network anyway.
None of the Shelly devices I have are z-wave, they are all Wi-Fi entirely. This includes several of the Shelly 1 power management in-wall relays, several of the Shelly external power management plugs of the kind that you plug into an outlet, a few of the Shelly in-wall dimmers/fan controllers and a couple Shelly bulbs.
I think if these had Z-Wave they would have cost a few dollars more each, due to licensing. It would be nice because I do have a Z-Wave mesh up and running alongside a zigbee mesh and a few oddball Wi-Fi only devices like these shellies, but they work well enough with home assistant that I don't consider to be a drawback yet.
The only thing I wish they could do better is expose more of their configurable options via whatever API they present to home assistant. A couple of these devices speak mqtt which opens up a few more capabilities, but there are still many fine-tuning aspects like controlling the way a switch attached to the device functions, i.e. whether it behaves as if it is detached or functional - useful with toddlers around) are invisible unless you are using the built-in web configuration page.
I'm sure the right answer is open source stuff, self-hosted. But as an alternative, the Apple Homekit architecture does seem serious about keepig as much info as possible on the devices themselves and not throwing stuff into the cloud.
Maybe that's why the number of smart devices that work with Homekit is so limited?
I really don't understand many of the "smart" device manufacturers. They clearly aren't capable of running the services required to manage their devices, so why do they keep insisting on doing so? My parents have a smart radiator that couldn't be managed for over a month because a server in Norway was down. Why not just have it be manageable by Homekit and skip the infrastructure cost?
Money for one but there is little actual standarization that have enough clout for it to happen.
99% of IoT devices would be fine with just "here is MQTT address" and a way to push updates (preferably with gateway downloading updates and devices updating only from gateway)
I haven’t used Hue bulbs since their first products, so I can’t really compare, but I have had no problems with IKEA bulbs or switches in terms of quality and features.
My only issue is that their Tradfri outlets are too big and poorly shaped. I can only fit small plugs next to them (in US outlets).
There’s no such thing as trusting a brand - trust community effort only. That’s my rule where possible. If stuff doesnt work end to end with open solutions i am not buying it. I mean these companies take our money and then treat us as if we are the product?
Right: It's not the companies' fault they're engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices; they're profit-maximizing machines. They don't care about trust or know what it is.
It's our fault we're letting them do that. Bad behavior should be affecting profits. Probably through regulation.
> Right: It's not the companies' fault they're engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices; they're profit-maximizing machines. They don't care about trust or know what it is.
this is an extremely dumb take, of course the people working at companies are responsible for bad dumb decisions that make their products worse.
But that's not how it effectively works at scale. It only takes a single person not bound by morals to mess it up for everyone. Those people naturally float to the top and are loved by shareholders (hence who's in charge at most places).
Individually the organisation is made up of people, but at large it's a big anonymous machine because those people are rewarded super-duper one-dimensionally: Help profits and you're rewarded or hurt them and you're out.
It makes about as much sense to anthropomorphise corporations as it does to anthropomorphise lawnmowers. They can not feel empathy.
> But that's not how it effectively works at scale. It only takes a single person not bound by morals to mess it up for everyone.
The onus might be on us as the public to change the laws to outlaw bad behaviour, but this does not absolve the companies, and especially the people within them who conduct, condone, or reward deceptive and unfair business practices.
There is a somewhat strangely named German brand that sells private IoT door / security cams. Forgot the name, sadly. They’re quite expensive though. My guess is they might sell private lightbulbs.
For home audio, Sonos is great. Their voice assistant is completely locally processed.
Are you joking about Sonos? They force you to have account with them to use speakers and you have to enable location sharing on your app to connect (!!). They know more about people than their parents do.
> Are you joking about Sonos? They force you to have account with them to use speakers and you have to enable location sharing on your app to connect
Tangential PSA: Red Sea (aquatics) does/did this too. I can't control the lights on my fucking aquarium without all four of them being connected to the internet over wifi and managed through an account registered with an app with location sharing enabled. Only the iOS app worked; the Android version was completely broken.
The app lets you group lights and model the lighting curves however you want but there's no reason this couldn't have been done over Zigbee. I assume my LAN is now part of some Mossad botnet.
Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers, as we all arbitrarily doing things like blocking streaming of audio from your phone.
Sonos might have been good in the past when they were selling a way of streaming your ripped mp3s around your house, they are no longer good now that they think they own the content too.
> Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers
Sonos has a ~10 year support timeline on their speakers. That's longer than even Apple supports any of their devices, and they're often considered the gold standard of long support of tech products.
I hate being made to defend Sonos twice as it makes me feel like a shill, but it is truly how it is.
Sonos doesn’t have tracking. That’s my entire point. And it’s extremely ironic you call Bose “no strings attached”, that’s what Sonos is about in the most literal sense.
You pay a huge premium in trade for less wires, great multi-room audio, decent sound and a long support timeline.
I will say that I hope Sonos and Google bury the axe at some point, and the Cast (or at least DIAL) protocol gets added.
On the planet I live on, Sonos does obnoxious tracking. There is no direct communication between client and speaker at all - everything calls/is routed via home. Moreover client on mobile requires and will refuse to run setup until you grant it precise location permissions. It's a spaghetti of strings attached.
Bose and other bluetooth speakers don't have any strings attached because:
* you don't have to be connected to the internet to use it
* you don't have to have account with them to use it
* you don't have to grant tracking permissions to use it
* manufacturer can decide to discontinue product or go bankrupt - it doesn't matter, you can still use product as you did before, you're unaffected
* you don't have to worry about software deprecation - new versions of sonos client for iOS require recent versions of Apple devices - you can't install client on older phones/tablets to use your speaker
And yet they're one of the few (only?) smart speaker that does locally processed commands. You and everyone else downvoting me are unknowledgeable clowns.
You might be thinking of the Homematic IP line, great products for home automation, they also have door locks etc. They are also compatible with just Homematic which doesn't use the internet (so no IoT), but rather a local gateway for controlling the devices. I don't think they have lightbulbs though. The company name is eQ-3
Homematic has a pretty good reputation. Their stuff is reliable and they're quite open to DIYers. In turn the products are a bit on the expensive side, but not wildly so.
https://smart-life24.de/ perhaps? They do sell light bulbs. They're not particularly expensive. I think you might need an account with the Smart Life app, and my girlfriend appears to have a proper account using her e-mail address, but my user ID appears to be a random string, so I guess that's somewhat private?!
Word of warning about Netatmo cameras - even if you buy the HomeKit Secure Video ones, they stop working if the memory card dies. And it dies a LOT on their cameras. I've got 3 of their outdoor security cameras, and two of them stopped working while I was away on holiday. I had a very long conversation with them about this massive flaw in their system, they kept just saying "it needs the memory card to save the video" - I pointed out that a) it doesn't, it's streaming to HSV, and b) with every other camera I own the memory card is optional. The quality of the video on them is also considerably worse than any of my other cameras.
Good to know! I have been using Logitech circle view with HomeKit secure video with no problems other than needing to make sure wifi strength is plentiful.
Ideally, there would be a wired HomeKit secure video option, but I have yet to see it.
I have a Logitech cam too and it's been trouble free with a great picture, though for some reason it does seem to take longer to start streaming on my iPhone than the other cameras. I was really hoping for some big improvements in Home / HomeKit with iOS 17 but alas, no.
True, I have a wired Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub but it does seem to just change on a whim from time to time - there's about 15 candidate hubs in the house!
> Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub
How?
I was under the impression that you cannot actively decide which device becomes the primary one?
I 'only' got a wired ATV and a HomePod mini - and the mini is the primary hub way more often that i'd like it to be (like... none of the time, at all :) )
It's a royal pain in the arse, but it involves unplugging every candidate hub and plugging them back in again in the preferred order. Can't say for sure, but I think the points where my preferred order has changed without me doing anything were down to very short power cuts during the night, when that happens, you get whichever device boots back up first as your primary hub.
Depends on how DIY you want to go - i got a Dahua VTO-something doorbell that is powered by PoE that in turn is bridged into HomeKit/HKSV via Scrypted - works pretty darn well :)
Scrypted supports quite a few cameras, doorbells etc...
Honestly is there any IoT brand that we can trust long-term? Maybe IKEA stuff?