Until recently my smart home the installation was in chaos. After years of testing, purchasing, and upgrading to the latest smart home gadgets in an attempt to make my life easier, it had become a bloated mess that actually made it more complicated.
My AlexaThe Google Home and Apple Home apps were filled with broken devices, duplicates, and automations that simply didn't work. My Hue Bridge, desperately trying to tie it all together, was creaking at the seams. And more advanced platforms that I wasn't entirely sold on, like Homey and SmartThings, were fighting each other for bandwidth on an already congested network.
Basically, I was hired as a full-time technician in my own home, just so the kids wouldn't moan about their lights not working… again. It's time for a reset—a chance to begin completely reimagining what an end-to-end smart home should look like in 2025. If this sounds daunting, it doesn't have to be. Here's how I gave my smart home a much-needed reboot and brought harmony into my home again.
Bye, Alexa
Many people reading this probably took the same path as me: adding devices to Alexa first because it was easy, then losing control when the smart home boom outpaced the platform that was supposed to keep everything in sync.
This meant I ended up launching a network of professional-grade smart home products on an operating system that, let's face it, was designed to add dishwasher tablets to your shopping list and remind kids to brush their teeth. It was never really designed to handle low latency state changes across hundreds of different devices.
Alexa has gotten better for moderate smart home users, however, as Amazon has added things like Zigbee radios. Make a difference In recent years it has added controller and Thread Border Router functionality, all of which give it a little more flexibility. But it's still more of a great digital assistant than a dedicated smart home system, and anyone looking to build something serious should look elsewhere.
I've already started migrating some stuff to HomeKit a while ago, and Apple's ecosystem is actually vastly superior to Amazon's for the smart home – something worth considering if you're a full-on iOS user and devices like Apple TV and HomePod, especially with Thread radio, which is now built into most modern iPhones as well.
