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The freedom of a hub-less smart home


iDevices News, The freedom of a hub-less smart home
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One of the important qualities of all iDevices products is the ability to operate without hubs, bridges, subscriptions or additional accessories. All you need is a Wi-Fi connection, and you've got the freedom to control, schedule and monitor your home from anywhere. 

Let's start with some background: a hub is a piece of hardware that connects the devices on a home Wi-Fi network and controls communications among them. So just to reiterate, it's another piece of hardware — exactly what we don't need in our already cluttered closets full of old DVD players, desktop computers and modems we keep forgetting to recycle. 

While commenting on the rise and fall of smart home hubs, one CNET writer wondered whether smart home hubs are "the VCRs of a Blu-ray age." The same article points out how the market presence of hubs has dwindled in recent years due to the growth in voice control. Smart speakers with built-in voice assistants "more successfully place themselves at the center of the smart home," the article notes. 

Why did iDevices decide to go the hubless route for our smart home product line? First and foremost, we wanted to forego a single point of failure. To put it blatantly, your hub is directly wired into your home's router. If your wireless connection fails, even for a moment, all of the smart home products in your home will fail. 

In this scenario, your products will reboot, forcing you to set up all of those careful automations you created once again. That means you'll have to re-create that "away on vacation" scene that included 15 products. Just think, your network could drop out again at any time and you're starting at square one. What's the definition of insanity? Not exactly the way we want and need our smart homes to operate on a daily basis. 

But network outages aren't the only issue that hubs can create in the smart home environment. Some of the inconsistencies and problems we were looking to avoid with our hubless product line were brand exclusivity within a hub (the hub only connecting to products of the same brand), range issues from each smart home product to the hub, and hub shelf life and updates, forcing users to purchase new and improved hubs over the years instead of just enjoying live, over-the-air updates.

With iDevices, you can control, monitor and schedule every facet of your home without purchasing and connecting a separate hub. Instead, our products pair with the free iDevices Connected app and communicate through our secure cloud technology, designed by our in-house engineers and developers. By perfecting and optimizing our app over the past few years, and continually updating the user experience and the app's functionality, we have been able to reduce latency, increase security, and provide access to your home from anywhere.

With the ability to access your entire home through the iDevices Connected app without a hub, you can keep an eye on every smart product you use, no matter where its located. Plus, our app acts as an aggregator for all Apple HomeKit-compatible products, allowing for the creation of even more complex scenes to fit your lifestyle. 

Operating a hub-free smart home provides control without boundaries — that's a feature we're proud to support.