Until recently, my Smart home setup was disorganized. After years of testing, purchasing, and upgrading to the latest smart home gadgets in an effort to make your life easier, it turned out to be a bloated mess that was actually making it more complicated.
My Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home apps were filled with dead devices, duplicates, and automations that weren’t working. My Hue bridge, desperately trying to tie it all together, was creaking rapidly. And more advanced platforms that I wasn’t quite committed to, like Homey and SmartThings, were fighting each other for bandwidth on an already congested network.
I was basically hired as full-time tech support in my own home, just to keep the kids from moaning that their lights weren’t working… again. It was time for a reset – a chance to completely rethink what a comprehensive smart home should look like in 2025. If this sounds difficult, it doesn’t need to be. Here’s how I gave my smart home a much-needed reboot and brought harmony into my home once again.
Goodbye, Alexa
Many people reading this have probably walked the same path I did, initially adding devices to Alexa because it was easy, then losing control as the smart home boom overtook the platform that was meant to keep everything in sync.
This meant I started running a network of prosumer-grade smart home products on an operating system that was, let’s face it, designed for adding dishwasher tablets to shopping lists and reminding kids to brush their teeth. It was never really designed to handle low-latency state changes across a hundred different devices.
However, as Alexa has gotten better for moderate smart home users, Amazon has added Zigbee radio, Matter Controller, and Thread border router features to it in recent years – all of which give it a bit more flexibility. But it’s still a great digital assistant compared to a dedicated smart home system, and anyone looking to build something serious should look elsewhere.
I started porting some stuff to HomeKit a while ago and Apple’s ecosystem is actually much better than Amazon’s for smart home – it’s worth considering if you’re on iOS and devices like Apple TV and HomePod, especially with Thread Radio which is now built into most modern iPhones as well.