Smart Home Products Actually Worth Buying

Our test home has run 90 connected devices for the past 14 months. We logged every automation trigger and manual interaction. The result is unflattering for the industry: four categories account for almost all sustained use.

The four that stick

Lighting, heating control, locks and robot vacuums. Each replaces a chore you would otherwise do daily, and each degrades gracefully when the internet drops.

The ones that don't

Connected kitchen appliances, smart mirrors, most sensors beyond door and motion, and anything requiring a proprietary hub with no local control. Interaction rates fell below once a month for all of them by week twelve.

Buy for local control

Matter over Thread, Zigbee and local APIs kept working through two ISP outages and one cloud service shutdown. Cloud-only devices simply stopped being part of the house.

Privacy checklist

Before buying: confirm local processing for cameras, check whether recordings leave the building, and read what happens to your data if the company is acquired. We publish the audit for every device we review.