A harsh critique of the current state of the "Smart Home". The vision was of a home full of smart devices -network enabled, remotely controllable and managed via local applications, phones and cloud services.

We now have three competing vendors all trying to be the one ecosystem of the Smart Home: Apple, Google and Amazon. The financial disaster which is Alexa highlights how even for them it is a way to lose money -and raises the question "how long will Amazon keep the blue light on your Alexa on?". Some the problems technical, but many are related to usability and integration.

Based on experiences of attempting to use devices through all the ecosystems, and even writing a basic Alexa skill, this highlight how broken the smart home currently is. Like the need to give Alexa and Philips Hue light bulb groups different names so alexa knows which office lights to turn on. Or the way which cloud-hosted platforms can change their speech recognition and pattern matching algorithms without any warning or control. What longevity can we expect of the hardware-cloud-enhanced devices may have a lower purchase price but they depend on VC cash to keep working.

What can we do? We must embrace platforms such as Home Assistant to stay in control. Yes, you get add debug statements to python modules to fix plug authentication -but if we developers do this, others will benefit. We also need to look at the survival of cloud integration -a subscription model is the only one which works. Finally, there is the promise of Threads, the low power wireless mesh network, and Matter, the model and API for devices and applications -useful but insufficient.

A code free talk; the audience will get the historical context of the early Ubicomp work and the experience of trying to get the modern platforms to achieve that visions from the turn of the century. While things have moved on from hacked together hardware and rigged demos -they haven't moved on far enough.