Your hub should be local and open

Paulus Schoutsen April 5, 2016

• Internet-of-Things

Comments

Today the news spread that Google will be shutting down the Revolv hubs. And shutting down here doesn’t mean they stop selling or supporting them - no, they are sending an update to each hub to turn your perfectly fine home automation hub into a useless piece of plastic. The fact that this seemed like a good idea by Google astonishes me. If anything, they should have gone the same route as ninjasphere: open it all up and let people decide on the fate of their own hub.

I’ve said it before but I’ll repeat it again:

The cloud should be treated as an extension to your smart home instead of running it.

Your hub should not be affected when your internet breaks down or the company that sold you your hub goes out of business. It should work locally so that it can continue to work even long after the vendor goes out of business or decides to kill it. Preferably, your hub should also be open so that the community can take over development after the vendor stops caring.

Unless you can afford losing a product here and there, be cautious when buying IoT products that depend on the cloud from companies that are not well established. The chances are high that they go bankrupt or get acquired and closed. This however is easier said than done as Gartner predicts that by 2017, 50 percent of IoT solutions will originate in startups that are less than three years old.