TL;DR It will take 5+ years for standards to get sorted out in home automation. Until they are, devices from different companies will not be compatible. Anything that you buy and install now will be inconvenient (you will need multiple interfaces) and become obsolete in a few years.

Now that there are many genuinely useful and modestly priced home automation devices (and I don’t mean smart refrigerators), we are ready to enter the rising portion of “the S curve” where penetration increases. Most of the devices can be retrofit, which will make uptake much easier.

But right now, most vendors have their own protocols. Common protocols are needed at 3 layers:  the user interface, such as a mobile phone/computer app (or web site), physical communication such as Bluetooth, Zigbee, or Wi-Fi, and data protocols (API’s, essentially). Most vendors appear to be moving toward a hub and spokes arrangement, where the hub handles communication to the user and outside the home, so there will also be competition for whose hub customers buy. Finally, I would add security as its own “layer,” since it is so important and currently completely neglected.

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