Late last week, smart lighting company Insteon closed abruptly and without warning its users.Its catalog of connected light switches, dimmer plugs, wall keypads and smart home sensors lost the ability to connect to servers to use its services. Their user forums were also closed and their leadership page was removed from their website.
Insteon did not respond to a request for comment. But when contacted via LinkedIn message, former Insteon CEO Rob Lilleness said that had no information to share and that he was no longer involved with the company. Thus, all its users have been left with obsolete products and without time to be able to renew them before the end of the service.
One of the abrupt risks of the Internet of Things
Insteon users have found that they were unable to control their home lights with the mobile app. Some smart switches still work like regular light switches, but many models are locked out. Customers who tried to reset their faulty devices to default settings found that after doing so, those devices no longer worked at all.
This case is attributed to Insteon was not a big company and therefore, he did not have as much power to maintain servers for his services. It had about 1,3 million customers, but that's a small fraction of the smart home market; which is in more than 50 million homes in the United States.
The sudden shutdown raises questions about what kind of responsibilities Insteon had to point out upcoming changes to people who had invested in its technology. For users who depend on door locks, security cameras and connected light bulbs in their home, this is a reminder that full control of one's own devices can be very tempting in the age of cloud services. . But if a provider is not very large and cannot maintain services over time, there is a risk that our expensive smart devices will be useless.
This does not mean that smart home devices are doomed to failure, since it depends more on having support for their functions in the cloud in the future and having basic functions locally. Long-term support is important. For this reason, Matter is an open source initiative that has the participation of Google, Amazon and Apple and that will help devices from different manufacturers work together more smoothly.
Source: Wired
