Stacey on IoT | Internet of Things news and analysis
April 22, 2022 by Stacey Higginbotham 12 Comments
Smart home company Insteon has shut off its servers, lost its management team, and on Thursday sent an email to customers explaining how it plans to sell any remaining assets to help pay off creditors as part of a formal dissolution of the business. It has been the most drama-filled end of a consumer IoT company to date — and also represents one of the biggest opportunities left for the Matter smart home standard going forward.
On Friday, April 15, customers started reporting that their Insteon app was down and their hubs could no longer communicate with the cloud. After reading those reports, I went online and discovered that, according to their LinkedIn bios, no one from the SmartLabs/Insteon management team was still working at the company.
Three of them had stripped the company name from their bios altogether, including Rob Lilleness, the former CEO. Lilleness founded Richmond Capital Partners, the company that invested $7.3 million in Insteon in 2017 with the idea of capitalizing on interest in smart homes. After I reached out to him on Saturday and reported the original story, he truncated his name on LinkedIn to R. Li. On the following Tuesday, he responded to my original inquiry by replying to me on LinkedIn saying, “Unfortunately, I am not involved with the company.”
By that time he also had taken his name, photo and bio off LinkedIn, appearing only as an anonymous LinkedIn member.
His statement to me was true, because as customers learned via email two days later, Insteon’s parent company SmartLabs had transferred its assets to a separate legal entity on March 22 called SmartLabs (ABC) LLC. SmartLabs ABC is a legal entity created to sell any assets and pay off the original SmartLabs’ creditors.
As part of that process, the new LLC contracted with a company to collect claims, and on April 12 issued a letter telling companies that have a claim on SmartLabs/Insteon to file them before Sept. 18, 2022.
SmartLabs ABC may have some assets to sell, including the source code that many customers would like to see made available, but the idea that Insteon will continue as a sort of going concern for anything but the most tech-savvy users is misplaced. A connected product is far more than its source code.
While a company might buy the SmartLabs code and host it, it’s unclear why a buyer would invest in paying for Amazon servers, continued updates, and the skills necessary to rebuild all of the integrations without the promise of some sort of new revenue. This also assumes that some of the more valuable integrations, such as those that link to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, would be approved by the larger companies.
After such a public shutdown of the Insteon service, many customers are likely to cut their losses as opposed to paying a new company to restart the service. We have offered a list of potential alternatives to keep some Insteon gear limping along. But many of those options require a level of comfort with smart home services such as Home Assistant, HomeBridge, HOOBS, or other DIY smart home tools.
Casual users of Insteon gear will likely look at ripping and replacing what they can. The good news is there’s an option on the horizon that can help. Matter, a smart home protocol championed by Google, Apple, Amazon, and Samsung (as well as hundreds of other companies in consumer IoT) is expected later this year.
The standard will create an interoperable data model for a selection of devices such as locks, lightbulbs, and HVAC equipment that will enable any Matter-certified devices to talk to them. Which means that if one Matter-certified hub stops working, a consumer can easily swap it out for a new one that can work with peripheral Matter devices.
Because the Matter standard isn’t actually here yet, this is all still theoretical. But the problem it could solve is very real. Insteon is only the latest example of a smart home company going out of business and stranding its users. We’ve also seen the death of early hubs and gear built by retailers such as Lowe’s and Staples.
We’ve also seen some connected device companies try to restart with a subscription model, as Wink did. That said, because Insteon’s technology used proprietary wireless radios to communicate among light switches, garage door openers, and other products, the loss of its service is a bit more complicated. Whereas companies such as Universal Devices have licensed the radio technology, so we could see new options that work with the stranded devices. But if a smart home is what you’re after, there are still no guarantees that anything you buy will stand the test of time.
Maybe Matter will change that. Then again, maybe it won’t.
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Filed Under: Analysis, Featured Tagged With: Insteon, Matter, Smartlabs
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As a service to existing customers, I would really like to see them allow the manufacturer in China to produce more of the core products (dimmers, switches, keypads) as replacements for failed units. Then let Universal Devices sell them. Instead, they will likely sell the patents off to a troll which will only hurt their existing customer base since it will prevent replacement units from being manufactured. Possibly this could be done with a carve out which would license the continued production of replacement units. The goal here is just to let existing customers limp along until Matter is available.
BTW, losing the Insteon Hub is not critical. I have one and stopped using it because it was very unreliable. Instead, I use the Universal Devices hub which has been completely reliable. So if you have a dead Insteon hub there is a simple alternative.
What is a larger problem for me is keypads. I have some locations which are dependent on multiple keypad buttons controlling remote dimmers. I don’t know of an alternative replacement for Insteon keypads.
I’d like another smart home enthusiast to pipe up and tell us about something you think would be a true hardware replacement for Insteon…and by replacement I mean something you can effectively deploy into every light switch box throughout the house. I have such an Insteon system…and luckily I have it all back online using HomeSeer. But what would you replace such a system with? 70ish Leviton WiFi based light switches? Z wave switches with slower communication and more limited range than Insteon? Replacing Insteon is an irritating, but not too hard of a task if you are a basic user had maybe a lamp dimmer module and a couple of smart switches. I put Insteon throughout the house because the wired in 110v smart devices were top notch at controlling lights, fans, etc…once you had it set up with Alexa. Even if the app was always horrible, you never needed to look at the Insteon App again after setting everything up. It was gravy for 5 years not a single device has yet to break or physically go bad. (The hub, I have heard is more failure prone.)
If you have enough tech savvy to get HomeSeer or ISY running, I think those are the only true workarounds for the moment. Solutions that allow you to control…but not reprogram/add/remove devices are not really complete solutions. Correct me if I am wrong, but is that not the major limitation of Home Assistant for the moment?
The devices will last about ten years and then they will all start failing around the same time. I am currently experiencing failure in a dozen devices. But they did run for the last ten years without problems.
These failures are a known problem with smart devices, the electrolytic caps used in these devices only last about ten years. But I will also say about half of the units I have looked at the crystal failed instead of the caps. They did not use high temp rated crystals.
I use mostly Sonoff products. Light switches, smartplugs, etc. The reason being that they are easily reflashed (after a small learning curve) with Tasmota open source firmware. That way, I have complete local or remote (via Wireguard) control, and no one can ever disable the functionality of the devices. I have 93 assorted devices running Tasmota in my home network today (over 2200 unique devices are supported). I feel sorry for those that invested in failing IoT companies; that’s how I got started. Back in the day, I was an X10 user. Once burned, I vowed never again. Open source and hobbyist friendly hardware all the way for me now.
Sonoff appears to be better now, but I am still leery of them. For the first three years or so they refused to get UL/ETL safety certification. If you Google around you will find pictures of Sonoff units that caught on fire. So I would recommend only using the newest Sonoff devices which have passed UL/ETL inspection.
Yes, that was the original Sonoff POW; they don’t make that anymore. I had them, but never had a problem with them. I have a rule of thumb that I derate everything sitting between the outlet and the load 50%. The newest outlet plug-in incarnation, the S31, has over voltage / current / power protection. I’ve intentionally overloaded them to test, and they just turn off. You can configure lower thresholds in Tasmota, too.
What I need is an ESP32 based replacement for the Insteon keypad dimmer. I have never seen one.
This is a great discussion regarding longevity. Me personally, I reject the idea that devices like smart light switches should have to be physically changed every 10 years. My parent’s house has electronic (but non smart) dimmers that are 20+ years old. What I’m saying is its unacceptable for the life cycle of wired-in 110v hardware to be treated like short life cycle electronic items that you upgrade/replace more often. If IoT companies choose to make cheap crap that fails or has such a short intended life cycle every 5 years…who would want a house full of that? Such a business model will diminish consumer confidence…and willingness to make larger investments in any smart home tech.
Those electronic dimmers don’t have a microprocessor and radio in them. You can construct them without having to use components that have limited lifetimes. You are also simply lucky that they are still working. You must be in an area that does not get many lightning strikes.
It is certainly possible to build smart dimmers that last 20-30 years. But no one wants to pay for them which is probably not too bad of a decision. The technology is changing too much and after ten years you probably want to upgrade to the next wave. The problem is that you need to replace multiple 15-cent caps with ones that cost $2-3. You might say you’d pay 50% more for a 20-year lifetime dimmer. But if I put 10-year and 20-year dimmers on a shelf in Home Depot it doesn’t matter what the box says, the cheapest one will sell.
Also, this is not planned obsolescence. It is simply the observation that the cheaper dimmer will outsell the 20-year model 50 to 1.
There are many dimmers supported by Tasmota, you can search at their supported devices list, at ‘templates dot blakadder dot com’ for something that meets your needs. An ESP32 is not needed for that; an ESP8266 is more than capable (unless you also want it to be driving a display, or something similar).
Assuming the TopGreener Scene Controller Switch (TGWFSC8-W) hasn’t been tuyafied and can’t run Tasmota I think I can use this. The trouble is that this is a switch and I need an integrated dimmer. But maybe I can figure out locations where I can splice a dimmer module into the load line. I don’t see any other scene controller options. I have this problem in eight places.
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