What Happens When a Smart Home Turns Dumb?

Smart home company Insteon appears to have vanished without warning last week. All of its products haven’t worked since April 14th, its help forums are offline, its phone is disconnected, and it hasn’t responded to questions from customers or the press. By the end of the weekend, its execs had also scrubbed their LinkedIn profiles of any mention of the company.

It seems that someplace, somewhere, Insteon and the dodo are meeting for the first time.

📱🏠 A deeper dive… The smart home company produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and the Insteon Hub (which would bridge all your gear to the Internet and enable use of the Insteon app).

• All of these devices are currently useless, but many of Insteon's wall switches were actual electrical switches, so the worst that will ever happen is that they become dumb switches (aka you have to use your hands. The horror😱).
• And tech-savvy individuals are able to control the devices locally without the app. Per Ars Technica, it's also possible to pipe that local control into another platform's hub controller, returning the smarts and remote access to your home.

🤔 What’s next?... No one really knows. Insteon is owned by another company called Smartlabs, which was purchased by Richmond Capital Partners in 2017. Following the acquisition, the founder of Richmond Capital Partners, Rob Lilleness, was installed as CEO (one interesting thing: the blog post announcing the deal has been scrubbed from the website, but you can see it here).