https://www.pcmag.com/news/smart-home-company-insteon-shuts-down-servers-without-warning
Dang, that’s actually kind of sad tbh.
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The bright side for Inovelli is there’s going to be a TON of people looking to switch out their switches over the next year or 2.
There’s been an influx of Insteon users to Home Assistant these past few days since it can control the hub locally. The issue seems to be with anybody who has reset their insteon hub trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, they have no way of adding the switches back since the servers are down. I’ve seen posts where people have 40+ switches, reset their hub and are basically left with a bag of bricks.
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I’m glad to know that home assistant will never just “stop working” one day.
The fact that it is open and crowd-sourced I think it’ll be here in perpetuity.
Even ST with their behind the scenes move away from hardware made me gunshy, not that it isn’t in good hands with Aeotec.
No, it will just die a slow, painful death as the contributors move on. I just saw a thread on the HA forums a few days ago about the VERA integration no longer being maintained. HA 2022.04 dropped legacy power reporting, and nobody is around to make the legacy VERA code compliant with the new power-reporting stuff.
On Hubitat, the developer of the third-party BroadLink RF/IR driver literally took his ball and went home…going as far as deleting the online repository where his code was shared. This happened the day after I ordered my BroadLink device, which is still in its box because I’m not going to run an unsupported version of a pirated copy of that driver when I can’t even see if/what license it was shared under. I may try it in HA one of these days, but have since found an alternate solution to what I was going to use the BroadLink for.
Another example on HA is the OpenEVSE support. It is part of the HA core, but not yet updated for GUI configuration. It also doesn’t report power stats into the Energy tab. These are probably signs that it is not being maintained, and will vanish in a future HA release…
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Looking at the Vera integration in HA’s documentation, you can see " The Vera integration was introduced in Home Assistant pre 0.7, and it’s used by 8 active installations." The key thing I’m seeing there is that the integration is currently being used by 8 people… Now obviouisly that is based on those who have opted to be part of analytics, and the last number I saw that was 100,000 users. So 8/100k is roughly 0.00008% of the user base… With that small of a user base, I wouldn’t expect it to be any sort of priority to developers, especially since it’s support for a competing platform.
With that said, GitHub shows the code was last updated 14 days ago. I would hardly call that not being maintained.
It’s hard to compare an add-on to a closed-source platform like HE to an open source platform like HA. There are thousands of forks of the HA code with an open license so even if the devs suddenly pulled the plug like this Broadlink guy did, it’s still going to be very much alive. And, I will say the Broadlink integration on HA works very very well.
Similar to the Vera integration, you can find on the Open EVSE integration " The OpenEVSE integration was introduced in Home Assistant 0.38, and it’s used by 1 active installations.". So this one is even more of a fringe case than Vera, but the repo shows it was last updated 3 months back.
I’d hardly say it’s dying a slow painful death because a few fringe integrations aren’t maintained on the daily. But the beauty of HA is that literally anybody can put in a pull request to update any integration they want. As long as it passes reviews it’ll be merged. Compare that to finding a bug on ST or HE and you’ll quickly see why HA is growing at a significantly faster pace.
From the 250+ devs that have individual PR’s in last month’s release, I’m going to give it a slim to none chance of that happening anytime soon.
HA is much MUCH bigger than the individuals Nabu Casa employs. It’s primarily community coded.
Just about 150k that elected to share their data currently… Insteon will bring over a bunch as well.
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Hahahaha I’m an idiot. I looked for the number on that very page and missed it. Meanwhile it’s right on top…
149,322 users providing data.
So Vera = 8/149,322 and OpenEVSE is 1/149,322. So if you take Vera as the example, and assume the use-rate stays fairly consistent over a larger sample size, that means for every 1 million users of Home Assistant there are 50 people that use the Vera integration, and it was still updated just 14 days ago. To me… that’s impressive!
There’s at least two, because I’m not sharing analytics info. 
In this follow-up article, they point out that iHome is also 404 as of a few weeks ago, and LIFX may be next:
https://www.theverge.com/23032451/smart-home-troubles-insteon-ihome-shutdown-matter
Interesting sales pitch for Matter tacked on as the potential savior for cloud-based server dependencies…
Just FYI, note that BECAUSE of this news, HA is already developing a dashboard and improved functionality of Insteon with LOCAL control:
@Eric_Inovelli should be out there with his Wacky Waving Inflatable Tube Guy advertising the blue series like CRAZY right now !
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I’m going to say this may be closer to 1/2353…I’m not sure how they calculate their stats, but if you look at the integrations tab with the default/internal integrations included, the 100% mark is only 2353? So whether the userbase that shares analytics is that small I’m not sure, but definitely possible that the numbers are much higher than it indicates. Just throwing that out there…I personally also do not share analytics info 
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Working on it! Spread the word
Scrambling over here big time for this pre-order launch!
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LOL nice – that’s hilarious! Literally cracking up over here haha!
Well, I’ve been a loyal Insteon Customer since 2008… This is incredibly disappointing. I honestly thought this was a joke since I haven’t seen any disruptions to my setup until I read the Wired article. But I am using Home Assistant with the Inteon2MQTT Add-on/Plugin/Integration to control all of my Insteon devices. The “CLOUD” burned me once already with the Revolv Hub (thanks so much Google for buying and shutting down a wonderful company /s), so I wasn’t about to rely on anyone else’s Cloud to run my Home Automations.
That being said Inovelli has been on my radar for a couple years now. My only dilemma now is: Dive into the Red Series and expand my Zwave network or wait for Matter and see what comes out of the Blue series.
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We’re glad to have you and welcome! Wish it was under better circumstances, but regardless we’re here to help in any way that we can
Regarding the Red vs Blue – that is definitely a tough question and one I’ve been personally struggling with too believe it or not. Everyone will have their preference for sure, so taking personal preferences out of the equation, I can speak to where we’re at as a company and hopefully it will help you make a decision (or at least have some context).
We have two manufacturers – a Z-Wave one and a ZigBee one.
Our Z-Wave manufacturer has struggled the past year or so to acquire Z-Wave chips. I thought that possibly it was just us, but I’ve spoken to other companies of all sizes and they’ve said the same thing – they just can’t get this manufacturer to give them the volumes. Likely because they manufacturer for Ring and they eat up all the Z-Wave chips.
Needless to say, our 2021 and so far in 2022 has been brutal regarding stock.
We started down the Blue Series path for a few reasons:
- ZigBee didn’t seem to have the supply issues as Z-Wave
- ZigBee provided a path to Matter
- ZigBee also allowed us to provide for our current customers (who use advanced hubs) but also reach a new market of people who may just be starting out and have an Amazon Echo (no advanced hub)
If I’m being honest, I didn’t think ZigBee had a chance compared to Z-Wave – and I think the other Eric (CTO) will say the same. But I’ve been proven wrong and actually am leaning in the camp of ZigBee based on what this new switch is capable of (everything and more from the Red Series).
Our strategy moving forward will be to focus on the Blue Series (ZigBee) as our primary line and simultaneously keep the Red Series (Z-Wave) around as it’s still very popular and many B2B clients prefer it due to it’s security.
We did hear some promising news regarding Z-Wave from our ZigBee manufacturer in that they think they can acquire enough chips to meet the demand, but I’m still waiting on a couple things before committing to them as it would be tough to walk away from our Z-Wave manufacturer.
NET: 2022 will likely be out of stock for Z-Wave until possibly Q4 – whereas ZigBee will be ready here at the end of Q2. We will focus on ZigBee as our primary moving forward indefinitely and keep Z-Wave around in hopes that it will stabilize and we can offer both with no out of stock issues.
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Sorry for rambling, just thought I’d at least let you know where we’re at so you can make an informed decision!
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