Smarthomes: The Challenges

The smarthome market, meaning the home where your fridge, stove, microwave, lights, furnace and perhaps soon your toilet, are all connected via WiFi and managed through your smartphone, is set to reach $137 Billion by 2023. This according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. The first major entrant into this space was thermostat company, Nest. Google bought Nest a few years ago. The smarthome market is part of what is termed the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which includes just about anything you can stuff a sensor and WiFi connection into. This market is growing, there is little doubt. Yet it is facing some tough problems. In order for the smarthome market to truly take off however, these problems will need solving. We’re conducting some research now at Well Researched, but here’s the obvious for now.
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Interoperability

A major issue is getting these various devices, such as thermostats, smoke detectors, light controls, TV’s and sound systems, to all play nicely together.  It doesn’t help when you have to access several apps to do different things. Consumers are lazy, so IoT devices need to think from the perspective of laziness. Most don’t. There are some “home hubs” on the market that can do this, sort of, most of the time. Amazon’s Alexia is going down this path and of course, Apple has HomeKit and their new speaker called HomeHub coming this fall. Which brings us to the next issue; complexity.
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Complexity

The Nest and Phillips HUE are fairly easy to set up as are others. While most may be easy to set up on their own, having several of them brings complexity to the whole thing. This is a huge barrier to adoption for consumers, even more so than interoperability. This usually results in the geek of the house setting them up and managing them. Then other family members have to download the apps and get everything working. Another barrier.

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Uptime and Downtime

All of these devices rely on consistent WiFi in the home. While it’s getting better, even broadband can be spotty at the best of times. Not very helpful on a cold evening when you want to turn the heat up as you pick up groceries on the way home. A secondary issue is demand placed on the router and data collisions as devices compete for bandwidth. Too many devices can wreak havoc on a WiFi router.

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Security

This is the 800 Lb gorilla in the room. And it’s a nasty one. There have been a number of issues with smarthome devices being hacked, either within the home or the company’s data centre. IoT device makers have been notoriously lax in their security, mostly in rush to get products to market and make them easy to use.

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Value Proposition

Then there’s the value proposition. People adopt technologies that reduce or eliminate work or improve their lifestyle in some other unique way. The most successful of the smarthome devices to date have been thermostats. Light bulbs that change colour are cool, but a luxury at best.

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These are the major issues smarthome devices face today and will have to address in the near future. It is likely that companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft will create the “hubs” that make interoperability work. To a large degree this makes sense. But no doubt the likes of Amazon and Apple will find a way to make it a pay-to-play deal for device makers.

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What issues do you see? If you have a smarthome device, how has your experience been?