How I Built a Fully Offline Smart Home, and Why You Should Too
9th March 2025
If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
One of my biggest fears is that the manufacturer of a smart home product I use will go bankrupt and disappear overnight. It’s not an unfounded fear — just last year, smart home company Insteon abruptly announced that it would shut down its servers over financial difficulties. The servers would later return from the dead, but only because some loyal users acquired the entire company to keep its products alive. This isn’t a one-off example either — Philips stopped supporting its first-gen Hue Bridge in 2020 and MyQ’s garage door openers became incompatible with the Google Assistant without warning in 2023.
Many also care about the privacy implications of having cheaply made devices connect to the internet, but that’s a relatively smaller concern for me. Nevertheless, an offline smart home setup insulates me from both potential bankruptcy and privacy invasions.