Insteon Hub boasts a nifty collection of smart home appliances that you could wirelessly control via your smartphones. It also gives you the option to remotely manage and control the appliances, create schedules, and control alerts from sensors right from your linked devices. However, it seems we might need to rephrase all the aforementioned sentences in the past tense. This is because for the past two days, the entire Insteon Hub is down and not working.
Initially, it was attributed to the fact that their server might be down. But with the passage of time, a rather dreadful picture was being painted. When all the Insteon devices stop functioning at the same time, their support forums are non-accessible, all the listed products go out of stock and their third-party integrations like Amazon Echo/Alexa automation suddenly refuse to work, then the writing is on the walls for everyone to see.
Digging a little bit deep into their social media handles, their Twitter account hasn’t been updated since mid-June last year. Even more concerning is the fact that Rob Lilleness, the president and chairman of Smartlabs, no longer lists Smartlabs/Smarthome/Insteon anywhere on his LinkedIn profile. Likewise, Mike Nunes, the former CIO at Smartlabs, has listed that his role at Insteon/Smartlabs would end in April 2022. So join all the dots and it seems that the company has taken an exit door in a rather pathetic and unapologetic manner.
These smart home appliances are just used as another one of those toys for the tech-savvy, but are a boon for the everyday users and more importantly for the specially-abled people. Being a reputable player in this domain, if they had decided to leave this industry, then they should have at least given a notice to its userbase and chalked out a decent way forward that could benefit its loyal users in the long run.
Unfortunately, the word loyalty seems to be missing from their dictionary, and we the users seem to be the ultimate suffering party. Well, monopoly is never a good idea, to begin with, and having a ‘single provider for the entire technology stack’ made the matter even worse in this scenario. All in all, there is a greater need for an open-source home automation system.
This is because even if any player decides to leave the industry all of a sudden, other developers might be in a position to pick up the pieces and continue it forward [something that we love in the Android ecosystem]. Anyways, on that optimistic note, we round off this write-up as to why the Insteon Hub is not working. What are your views on this debacle? Do drop in your valuable insights in the comments section below.
Alternatives to Insteon Hub?
You could still run Insteon Hub locally without relying on their clouds and servers. For that, you could use quite a few open-source third-party apps, including the likes of Home Assistant, Homeseer, and ISY994 by Universal Device.
Out of all these three, Home Assistant is the best alternative for Insteon Hub and is also the most active in custom development. There is a plethora of documentation and YouTube videos for Home Assistant that you could refer to, apart from its official instructions.
