Today's smart home is better described as a remote-controlled home; more data and better interoperability between IoT devices is needed for a truly “smart” home
Today you can have a fully connected home complete with sensors to monitor temperature, humidity, air quality …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 argument landed mid-arc in the smart home story. Apple had just loosened HomeKit's software-based authentication and review process to widen its device ecosystem, while Gizmodo's reporting on how connected homes generate streams of personal data that can profile their occupants showed the cost side of exactly the data-sharing this piece calls for.
The years since tested the thesis directly: the Matter standard was supposed to deliver the interoperability gap this article identifies but instead suffered poor implementation and glacial progress, per The Verge's own Matter post-mortem, pushing rivals like LG and Samsung into a cross-brand control pact through the Home Connectivity Alliance. By IFA 2025, Amazon, Google, Samsung, and LG were pitching AI as the layer that finally makes homes intuitive — the same 'more data' bet this piece made seven years earlier.
First-order effects
- Device makers like Apple, Samsung, and LG face pressure to open their appliances' sensor data beyond their own apps, since a home that only responds to commands delivers no automation value over dumb hardware plus a phone.
- Consumers get the trade-off Gizmodo documented: richer cross-device data means more granular profiling of daily life inside the home.
Second-order effects
- When standards stall, as Matter did, manufacturers fall back on bilateral alliances — LG and Samsung's Home Connectivity Alliance arrangement shows interoperability being negotiated brand-by-brand rather than platform-wide.
- Whoever aggregates cross-device data — Amazon, Google, or the appliance OEMs themselves — gains the position from which to sell the intelligence layer, shifting competition from hardware features to data access.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smart home market consolidates around a small set of data aggregators sitting above otherwise commoditized sensors and appliances, with interoperability standards reduced to plumbing rather than strategy.
- Pervasive in-home sensing at that scale makes home data a regulatory target in its own right, extending the privacy concerns raised in the earlier coverage from single devices to whole-house profiles.
The trend: The smart home is migrating from remote control toward ambient, AI-driven automation, with the pace set less by device makers than by whether interoperability standards and data-sharing agreements actually hold.