The end of Insteon and why the smart home keeps faltering

The entire market of smart-home shit's gonna keep being terrible until/unless some decent, reliable, inter-operable, long-lived standard takes over or is imposed. It's all too expensive to be worth it unless you can be pretty sure it'll keep working for at least a couple decades.

Imagine if lightbulb sockets were proprietary! It'd be madness. The current state of things with smart home stuff is worse than that, because at least there's a decent chance proprietary-lightbulb-socket world would have plentiful adapters and 3rd-party manufacturers for most or all types. The odds of a company stepping in to provide a software-side fix for Insteon dying, are slim.

There’s no need to use Insteons hub/cloud service. Most Insteon power users that I know are using homeseer, homeassistant as a way to control the devices.

The other good thing about, at least the light switches (which is their core product), is that they work without an internet connection and will continue to function.

However unfortunately the less tech savvy users who set up automations through Insteons service will be left (quite literally) in the dark now.

Insteon devices function perfectly well without the cloud. I have several dozen of their light switches and motion sensors. The quality local communications (wireless that doesn't use 2.4GHz and interfere with WiFi + powerline) was the entire reason I went with them.

The cloud-connected hub to enable remote control was a bolt-on, and by far the least reliable part of their ecosystem.

So while I totally agree that smart home devices shouldn't require the cloud, Insteon is the wrong company to beat on there.

I think a big missing piece for the whole thing is the Just Works factor. You're either stuck with cloud garbage (some of which does, kinda, Just Work, until it doesn't), or a bunch of DIY. Meanwhile, with traditional dumb fixtures, switches, outlets, et c., I don't even pay attention to which brand I'm buying. They all work the same, and you hook them all up the same way, then forget about them until/unless they physically break.

Home Assisant, MQTT and Sonoff devices

Not that Sonoff devices are "great" out of the box for using them off the cloud, but they are pretty easy to flash tasmota onto them.

With HA there are a number of plugins that will allow you to easily setup duckdns&ssl, there is a app on both the Play Store and App Store.

EDIT: I run HA on a Rpi3 just fine, I also added a zigbee USB dongle which I use to control my TRVs. I also have some cheaper wifi sockets that could have tasmote flashed onto them, but they are a plain to open and access the pads needed to reflash them. The SonOff devices I've been playing with recently are easy to open and flash.

I also use shellys for my fixture lights, again easy enough to flash with tasmota so they are running off the local network.

Another Edit: https://templates.blakadder.com/ has a good list of tasmota supported devices.

OMFG ALL THE EDITS: Just make sure that the devices have a ESP chip in them before buying them if you want to reflash them. There has been a trend as of late of using other wifi enabled chips which tasmota doesn't support. Can't find the device on blakadder? Try https://fcc.io/ if you can find the FCCID (and your in the US) before buying the device and look for the internal photos, there is normally a pretty decent close up of the main processor in there. Also googling "The Device Name Tasmota" will often find results of other geeks trying to flash tasmota onto them.