In a world of me-first smart home gear, can smarthubs make them all play nice?
The SmartThings hub (left) and Revolv hub (right). — “Home automation” has become ho-hum. It's a catchall term describing the idea of a futuristic, connected home; what's essentially an array …
Context & Ripple Effects
The smart home's core problem in early 2014 is fragmentation: standards bodies have moved slowly, so vendors ship incompatible gear, and a January report on stalled smart home standards already flagged middleman services stepping into the gap. SmartThings and Revolv are the two most visible of these middlemen — each sells a hardware hub whose entire pitch is making disparate devices talk to each other.
The Ars Technica framing matters because it tests the category's premise rather than any single product: if "home automation" has become ho-hum, hubs are positioned as the fix that lets buyers mix brands instead of waiting for the industry to standardize. Both companies confirmed head-to-head competition on exactly that interoperability promise.
First-order effects
- SmartThings and Revolv are now locked in direct competition for the same buyer — the consumer with mixed-brand gadgets — so differentiation shifts from device catalogs to which protocols each hub supports and how usable its coordination software is.
- Device makers gain a de facto integration target: supporting a hub's API becomes a cheaper path to compatibility than certifying against multiple proprietary ecosystems.
Second-order effects
- Hub vendors have an incentive to broaden protocol support aggressively, pressuring single-ecosystem device makers to open up or risk being excluded from cross-brand setups.
- If hubs succeed, they insert themselves as the control layer between consumers and every device brand, putting pricing and feature power with whoever owns the hub relationship rather than the gadget vendor.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward interoperability becoming a platform battleground: either a dominant hub consolidates the middleman role, or device makers band together on shared standards to disintermediate the hubs — and the slow pace of formal standards work keeps both outcomes live.
- Whichever way it resolves, the value in the smart home migrates from individual devices to the coordination layer, reshaping where lock-in and margins sit across the industry.
The trend: With official smart home standards progressing slowly, third-party hubs like SmartThings and Revolv are racing to become the industry's de facto interoperability layer.