The truth? Everything I’ve done to tie the various strands of my smart home together has fallen apart almost as soon as it’s been put in place

EDITED BY ALEX COX

The main problem is, that to make automations happen between kit that speaks different languages (whether that hardware is deliberately obtuse or that’s just the way it is), you need to rely on some flaky intermediary to get the job done. Ever wonder why we don’t talk about IFTTT so much any more? It’s because, in my experience, If This Then That has turned into more of an If This Then Wait A Few Minutes And Maybe That If You’re Lucky.

IFTTWAFMAMTIYL is not quite as catchy an acronym. Stringify has bitten the dust, Yonomi seems to have a very limited number of supported devices; if you want X to talk to Y, you’re in for a fight. And I’m too old and tired to put up my dukes just to switch a light on.

I want my smart home devices to work, work fast, and work reliably. For that to happen, we need to sign every device up for a language course. We need the equivalent of smart device Esperanto, except we actually need this language to catch on.

The Nest Home Hub Max could one day fulfil its potential as a truly universal home control device, rather than something to get sticky in your kitchen.

The smart home dream

We’ve been promised a united smart home – so why does it seem to be fracturing even more?

Peering through the mists, we’re always soothsaying for signs of unity in the smart home world. If the fractured smart home landscape could unite itself as a compatible whole, without the need to add rickety bridges to join its many islands together, that would be a good thing. It would mean a wider choice of hardware, stronger platform understanding, widespread compatibility, and (probably) an easier point of entry. One app could, as Apple’s Home app tries to do, manage every smart device in your home – and you could take your pick of the app you wanted to use.

Pie in the sky stuff, right? The entire history of computing is one of rival platforms battling it out; today, after 40 years of the home computer, it’s a punch-up between the Mac, the PC, Linux, multiple incompatible phone systems and a ream of consoles. We have not even begun to converge on a single point. One platform does not rule them all, because playing nice isn’t in the best commercial interests of the parties involved. Just looking at Apple, because it’s the easiest example to cite, it has very sensibly placed a huge emphasis on the security of its platform. But it’s done so by (in the early days) requiring special hardware to be present in any device supporting HomeKit, and later requiring certified, licensed firmware. Whether you see this as Apple taking its pound of flesh really depends on your level of cynicism, but we’ve often cited Cupertino’s standoffish approach to letting folks play nice with HomeKit to be at least partly to blame for the still-slim range of fully-compatible hardware.