I ditched Alexa and upgraded my smart home

Until recently, my Smart home The setup was a mess. After years of testing, buying, and upgrading to the latest smart home gadgets in an attempt to make my life easier, it had become a bloated mess that was actually making it more complicated.

for me AlexaThe Google Home and Apple Home apps were full of dead devices, duplicates, and automations that simply didn’t work. My Hue Bridge, which was desperately trying to hold everything together, was screaming at the seams. More advanced platforms that I didn’t quite stick to, like Homey and SmartThings, were fighting each other for bandwidth on an already crowded network.

I’ve basically been working as full-time tech support at my house, just to keep the kids from complaining that their lights aren’t working… ever again. It’s time for a reset, an opportunity to embark on a complete rethink of what an all-in-one smart home should look like in 2025. If this sounds daunting, it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how I gave my smart home a much-needed reboot and added harmony to my home once again.

Goodbye, Alexa

Many people reading this have probably gone down the same path I did, which was adding devices to Alexa early on because it was easy, then losing control as the smart home boom outpaced the platform that was supposed to keep everything in sync.

That means I ended up running a network of consumer-grade smart home products on an operating system that, let’s face it, is designed to add dishwasher tablets to the shopping list and remind kids to brush their teeth. It’s not at all customized to manage low-latency state changes across a hundred different devices.

Alexa has just gotten better for moderate smart home users, with Amazon adding things like Zigbee radios, topic Controller and Thread Border Router features have been added to the mix in recent years – all of which give it a little more flexibility. But it’s still more of a great digital assistant than a dedicated smart home system, and anyone looking to build something serious should look elsewhere.

I actually started moving some things over to HomeKit a while ago, and Apple’s ecosystem is actually much better than Amazon’s smart home ecosystem — it’s worth considering if you use iOS and devices like the Apple TV and HomePod, especially with Thread Radio now built into most recent iPhones as well.