Nest adds new integrations with August, LIFX, Belkin WeMo, Misfit, SkyBell, others
Nick Statt / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second wave of Nest's partner program: the company had already added 15 partners covering smartlocks, lighting, and appliances in January 2015, and today's batch — August, LIFX, Belkin WeMo, Misfit, SkyBell — deepens those same categories rather than opening new ones. It lands just months after CES showed third-party smart home products flocking to Amazon's Alexa instead, making each new Works-with-Nest signing a counter-move in the contest over who aggregates the connected home.
The competitive frame matters because Comcast had already built a parallel aggregation play, expanding its own home automation platform with nine partners including both Nest and August. Nest is simultaneously a partner in someone else's hub and running its own — a tension that defines this whole market.
First-order effects
- Owners of August locks, LIFX bulbs, Belkin WeMo gear, Misfit wearables, and SkyBell doorbells can now tie those devices into Nest's thermostat-centric ecosystem, controlling them through one app and one set of automations instead of siloed vendor apps.
- August and SkyBell, which already appear inside Comcast's competing automation platform, now sit in two rival hubs at once — raising the odds their roadmaps get pulled toward whichever aggregator drives more volume.
Second-order effects
- Comcast's nine-partner platform and Amazon's fast-growing Alexa integrations force Nest to keep signing partners on breadth alone, since neither rival requires a Nest thermostat as the anchor device.
- For Belkin specifically, the WeMo line it was extending with door, window, and motion sensors gains a second major integration surface beyond its own app, making cross-platform support table stakes for every sensor vendor.
Third-order effects
- The longer arc cuts against this openness: Nest later moved to first-party hardware like the Nest x Yale lock and Hello doorbell, and reporting has Nest losing ground with residential builders as Google-era software changes impeded third-party device compatibility — suggesting the partner-program model gave way to a walled-garden one.
- If the pattern holds, the hub role migrates from thermostat makers to voice assistants — Alexa then, Google Assistant later — leaving device vendors like August and LIFX integrating with platforms rather than with each other.
The trend: Smart home integration is shifting from device-to-device partner programs anchored on thermostats toward voice-assistant platforms as the default aggregation layer.