I Ditched Alexa and Upgraded My Smart Home

Until recently, my the smart home setup was in chaos. After years of testing, buying, and upgrading to the latest smart home gadgets in an effort to make my life easier, it became a bloated mess that actually made it more complicated.

My Alexa, Google Home, and Apple Home apps were flooded with dead devices, duplicates, and automations that just didn’t work. My Hue Bridge, desperately trying to connect everything, was bursting at the seams. And the more advanced platforms I hadn’t really committed to, like Homey and SmartThings, were fighting for bandwidth on an already congested network.

I was basically employed as full-time tech support in my own home, just to keep the kids from complaining that their lights weren’t working…again. It was time for a reset, an opportunity to completely rethink what a global smart home should look like in 2025. If that sounds intimidating, it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how I rebooted my smart home and brought harmony back to my house.

Goodbye, Alexa

Many people reading this probably followed the same path as me, of adding devices to Alexa early on because it was easy, then losing control as the smart home boom outgrew the platform that was supposed to keep everything in sync.

That meant I ended up running a network of enterprise-grade smart home products on an operating system that, let’s face it, was designed to add dishwasher tablets to a shopping list and remind kids to brush their teeth. It was never really designed to handle low-latency state changes across a hundred different devices.

Alexa has gotten better for moderate smart home users, with Amazon adding things like Zigbee radios, the Matter controller, and Thread Border Router features to the mix in recent years, giving it a bit 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 had already started porting some stuff to HomeKit a while ago and Apple’s ecosystem is actually much superior to Amazon’s for smart home. It’s worth considering if you use iOS and devices like Apple TV and HomePod, especially with Thread radio now built into most modern iPhones.