2015 review — voice + HomeKit land. Security starts
End of year. Time to grade 2014's forecast and place bets for 2016.
Scoring the 2014 forecast
Seven predictions for 2015. Let me grade:
| Prediction | Confidence | Outcome | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alexa Skills Kit launches; ASK explodes | 95% | ASK released June; 1,000+ skills by Q4 | ✓ |
| HomeKit ships with hardware-security tax | 85% | iOS 9 (Sept) plus a handful of MFi devices (Lutron, Ecobee, August) | ✓ |
| Google ships voice — but not in home device | 60% | Google Now improvements, no home device | ✓ |
| Hub-or-cloud divide cements | 80% | Wink had two major outages; SmartThings cloud also wobbled. Hub model not vindicated yet | ✗ (both shaky) |
| First wave of security-arc posts | 100% | March 2015 first security automation shipped | ✓ |
| Unifying multi-vendor standard? | 5% | Nothing | ✓ (the "no" prediction held) |
| Aeotec Multisensor 6 launches Q2 2015 | 80% | Shipped October, not Q2 — half-credit | ½ |
5/7 hit, 1 missed, 1 half. ~71% accurate. Worse than 2013's 83%. Two reasons: bolder forecasts, and Apple/Google moved at different speeds than I predicted.
What got added to the house this year
- Apple TV 4 (October): bought it expecting HomeKit hub functionality. Works. The HomeKit ecosystem in 2015 is small but high-quality.
- Three more Lutron Caseta switches (March, June, September): no-neutral problem solved everywhere.
- One LIFX A19 bulb (April): WiFi-only color bulb. Bright but the always-on tax is real — runs warm, draws ~1W constant. Comparing it side-by-side with Hue this winter.
- Two Aeotec Multisensor 6 (October): six sensors in one. Humidity-fan automation works.
- An Ecobee3 thermostat (November): HomeKit-compatible, has its own remote sensors for room-by-room temp control.
- Hue v2 bridge (October): the new square bridge replaces the original round one and adds HomeKit support — which is why it landed alongside the iOS 9 HomeKit wave rather than earlier.
- Second Echo (July): bedroom. Two Echoes in the house works if you put them far enough apart (~10 m) that one always wins the wake-word arbitration.
What works at year-end
- Security automation running for nine months. False-alarm rate dropped from 1/week to roughly 1/month after switching to phone-based geofencing.
- Voice as the default control surface. "Alexa, dim the dining room to 30" gets used four times a day. I haven't opened the Hue app in a month.
- HomeKit for the iPhone family members. My wife uses Siri on her iPhone to control HomeKit-enabled devices (Lutron, Ecobee). Latency 1-2s, reliable.
- Bathroom humidity → fan. Saves the bathroom paint. Quietly the best automation in the house.
What still doesn't
- SmartThings cloud reliability. Two major outages this year (one a four-hour Friday-evening outage). When the cloud dies, custom SmartApps die. My security automation goes silent. I need local execution and I don't have it.
- HomeKit's walled garden. Lutron + Ecobee + Hue work great with Siri; nothing else in my house does. The MFi tax keeps the Z-Wave and Zigbee-HA-only world out of HomeKit. I'm running two parallel automation systems.
- LIFX vs Hue, by year-end. Hue won. LIFX bulbs run hot, drop off WiFi about once a week, and the colors are slightly less accurate than Hue. The WiFi-only approach isn't winning on my network.
The year's structural problem, drawn out: I'm running two automation brains that can't see each other.
Forecast for 2016
1. Google Home ships in 2016. (Confidence: 75%)
Google's been quiet on home devices but they have to respond to Echo. Late 2016 — Q3 or Q4 launch is plausible. Expect a smaller, music-first form factor.
2. Hue ships a motion sensor. (Confidence: 80%)
The Hue app's automation is anemic next to SmartThings. Hue's own motion sensor (battery-powered, Zigbee, designed-for-Hue-bulbs) would be the natural next product. Rumors are it's coming.
3. Apple HomeKit gets a dedicated hub. (Confidence: 60%)
Apple TV is the de facto HomeKit hub today. A dedicated, smaller device would make more sense — and the rumored AppleHome smart speaker (Apple's answer to Echo) might be it. 2016 is when Apple needs to ship that.
4. Zigbee 3.0 starts shipping in real consumer products. (Confidence: 60%)
The spec was ratified late 2014. The first 3.0-certified products should appear in 2016 — hopefully unifying HA and ZLL profiles, which would let Hue and SmartThings finally see each other natively without bridging.
5. The Thread Group ships first products. (Confidence: 50%)
Thread protocol announced 2014, devices have been "coming" for 18 months. Nest's next thermostat is rumored to ship Thread. 2016 is the year or it's vapor.
6. Home Assistant becomes a thing I notice. (Confidence: 40%)
There's a Python project called Home Assistant that some hobbyists are talking about. Local-only, YAML config, integrates with Hue, SmartThings, and a growing list of others. If it gets to 0.30 or so by mid-2016 with a sane UI, I might try it. The local-execution gap on SmartThings is the trigger.
7. SmartThings cracks under cloud reliability issues. (Confidence: 55%)
Two major outages this year. If they have three more in 2016, the community starts seriously looking for alternatives. Wink already lost a year's worth of users to cloud outages. SmartThings can absolutely follow.
The eight bets, ranked by how sure I am:
8. The first useful PoE smart-home camera. (Confidence: 65%)
WiFi cameras are unreliable on a saturated 2.4 GHz network. PoE cameras (Reolink, Amcrest, Ubiquiti) at the prosumer level should drop in price in 2016. Once they do, smart-home folks will start adopting them with NVRs.
What I'm buying in 2016
- Hue Motion sensor (whenever it ships).
- Google Home (whenever it ships).
- A Reolink PoE camera or two if prices drop below $80.
- Maybe a Home Assistant install on a Raspberry Pi as a sandbox.
What's next
Next post: HomeKit and the MFi chip moat — why Apple's hardware-security requirement keeps most of my Z-Wave and Zigbee gear out of Siri's reach (the Lutron Caseta integration was my first HomeKit-enabled device, and it's the lens for that post).