Amazon Echo Plus review: falls short as a Zigbee smart home hub, and Alexa app's smart home controls need more refinement and features
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after CNET's review of the $99 Echo (2017) established the new speaker lineup's value play, Ry Crist's Echo Plus verdict lands on the opposite problem: at a premium price, Amazon bundled a Zigbee radio into a speaker, but the hub half of the pitch is what fails — devices pair, yet the Alexa app's smart home controls are too thin to run a home from. The review matters because it tests whether a mainstream speaker can replace a dedicated hub, and in 2017 the answer is no.
The follow-on coverage shows Amazon took the critique seriously rather than abandoning the idea: the second-gen Echo Plus a year later is judged the best Alexa speaker with a Zigbee hub, adding a temperature sensor, and by 2024 Amazon had split the function into a dedicated $180 Echo Hub supporting Zigbee, Thread, and Matter.
First-order effects
- Buyers paying the Echo Plus premium get working Zigbee pairing but an incomplete control layer — the Alexa app, not the radio, is the bottleneck Crist identifies, so early adopters still need their existing hub or phone apps for day-to-day control.
- Zigbee device makers gain a large potential installed base overnight, but only nominally: until Amazon's software catches up, their products are discoverable yet poorly manageable through Alexa.
Second-order effects
- Amazon is pushed into a hardware iteration cycle — refining the hub-in-a-speaker formula in the second-gen Echo Plus before conceding that serious smart home users want a separate box, which is where the Echo Hub line ends up.
- The audio comparison against rivals like the Sonos One forces Amazon to justify the Plus on hub value rather than sound, sharpening price-tier segmentation across the Echo lineup established by the cheaper 2017 Echo.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, smart home control migrates off the smartphone app and onto Amazon's hardware — first speakers, then purpose-built hubs — with protocol support broadening from Zigbee alone to Zigbee, Thread, and Matter, pressuring the industry toward standardized, hub-mediated device interoperability.
The trend: Amazon's smart home strategy is evolving from bolting a Zigbee radio onto speakers toward dedicated multi-protocol hubs, with each generation answering the software gaps reviewers flagged in the first Echo Plus.