Around 2015, smart homes and IoT seemed poised to automate everyday life. A decade later, much of that dream evaporated along with many market players. In a [Caya] video covered by Hackaday, here’s why.
From X10 to standards chaos
Home automation dates back to 1975 (X10 over power lines). The real explosion came with the IoT boom — and dozens of incompatible standards: Wi‑Fi, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, Matter, Thread.
What went wrong
- Abandoned IoT devices after cloud services shut down
- Subscriptions, ads, and privacy violations
- Crowded 2.4 GHz band — worse wireless reliability
- Unsustainable cloud infrastructure for vendors
- Local setup complexity for average users
Home Assistant as an answer — and its limits
Home Assistant offers local control without vendor cloud lock-in. But even plug-and-play Home Assistant Green (~$200) is often too hard for non-technical users — especially when documentation steps fail.
Another issue: smart homes often aren’t smart — they’re manual rules, not real intelligence. Voice assistants (Alexa, etc.) still fall short.
Takeaway for property owners
A local platform plus professional deployment is where smarthome.kiev.ua and Smarthome Cloud bridge the gap between DIY and reliable automation.
Source: Hackaday — Why The Smart Home Bubble Popped (May 21, 2026).
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