Wink announces Relay, a $300 wall-embedded touchscreen for controlling smart home devices
How one tiny startup is winning the race to power your smart home — For decades the smart home has been a tantalizing dream just out of reach. There are hundreds of connected devices on the market …
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months after Quirky spun out the Wink app and $79 hub and weeks after the Connected Home Collection hit Home Depot shelves, Wink is extending the platform from a pocket screen to a fixed one: Relay, a $300 touchscreen embedded in the wall. The move rides on the distribution and device base already assembled — the Home Depot partnership that put Wink hardware in a big-box aisle and cheap anchors like the $15 GE connected LED bulb meant to seed homes with Wink-compatible devices.
The story traveled unusually wide for a single product announcement — Gizmodo, Gigaom, Digital Trends, ReadWrite, Co.Design, TWICE and others all picked it up on the day — reflecting how crowded the smart-home control-point race had become by September 2014.
First-order effects
- Wink now sells a three-tier control stack — $79 hub, free app, $300 wall panel — letting it capture households at different price points while keeping them inside its software layer.
- The Home Depot channel gets a premium shelf item beyond the hub-and-bulb starter kit, deepening the retail relationship established with the Connected Home Collection.
Second-order effects
- Rival smart-home platforms competing on price now face a Wink tier that monetizes convenience rather than connectivity — pressure to add their own fixed-interface offerings or defend the phone-as-remote default.
- Device makers weighing which ecosystem to certify against see Wink adding surface area for their products to be surfaced, reinforcing the pull created by the low-cost GE bulb strategy.
Third-order effects
- If wall-mounted touchscreens prove buyers want ambient home control rather than another app to open, smart-home competition shifts from who connects the most devices to who owns the interface on the wall — an interoperability question, since whoever controls that panel mediates every device behind it.
- A pattern of stacking hardware tiers onto a single software platform would push the category toward consolidation around a few control layers, with retailers like Home Depot acting as gatekeepers of shelf space.
The trend: The smart home is moving from phone-app control toward dedicated in-home interfaces, with platforms layering hardware tiers to own the household's control point.