I’ll pop in real quick – sorry, this week has been insane and I haven’t really been available to answer community threads. Hopefully next week I can get caught up!
Yeah it’s been a real fun time over here lol. Luckily, it’s getting all sorted out, slowly, but still moving forward. I plan to make an announcement shortly once the various deals behind the scenes are settled (investor, B2B, partnership, etc – a lot happening!)
Awesome, I will keep this in mind – I’m wondering if it is similar to Zigbee in that we’ve specified it to be a router as well. Considering it shares the same chip, I think we should be good, but I’ll for sure pass it on to the team.
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As for the update – the brief version is that we have given the PRD (Project Request Doc) to the manufacturer for review and they think it will be an easy project. That’s the good news.
The “bad” news is that there’s a new COO (to be announced) who we’ve brought on that has a ton of experience with IoT as well as relationships in the industry and he’s basically wanting to go through these different opportunities and figure out which ones make the most sense.
If I’m being honest, one of my issues personally has always been getting too excited about things and trying to bite off more than I can chew. I know deep down these opportunities will sell and that has actually been the problem all along… our stuff sells too well. This is a problem bc we can’t keep up with demand and things go out of stock. Couple that with growing lead times (they’re luckily getting better – but they were insane in 2021) and we just simply don’t have the cash to purchase 52 weeks of inventory and are stuck in this, “what do we do?” scenario where we have to prioritize SKU’s and discontinue others (even if they’re selling well).
His job is to balance us out, really look into the ROI’s on projects and figure out financing for these opportunities. The good news is he’s a low hanging fruit kind of guy and this project would definitely be low-hanging as the switch is already developed.
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A separate issue we’re having is really trying to break through to Apple to understand what their plans are for Thread/Matter. It took me talking to 5 different people for them to tell me anything and even that information was so basic, it really didn’t help me understand the full picture (it was simply letting me know that Bluetooth is required along with Thread). They won’t disclose anything around Matter which makes me nervous. If we spend all this time/money getting HomeKit certified, and they switch over to Matter, what does that mean for us?
Thanks, exactly right. I wish I had more insight, but everyone is pretty tight lipped
Dang, I should’ve just read the entire thread before typing out my response above lol – you said it way better than I did!
Question for you (and everyone else) – do non-HK certified devices work on HK? My guess is no, but figured I’d ask. If they do, I could definitely see the business case of coming out with a Thread Certified device and use the community and/or other unofficial avenues outside of us to promote the switches working in HomeKit, while we work on ensuring certification with HK, be it Matter or Thread.
My fear is that we waste time/money in HK Certification only for them to change the certification later when Matter is released and who knows if they’ll support prior certified versions. I’ve seen big companies do some real shady stuff (not saying Apple will, just in general, we’ve been burned before) and bc we’re a small company, customers turn on us bc they think it must be something wrong with the switch.
Curious here as well (I really just need to buy a HK device haha) – I’m guessing HK is similar to Alexa/GH in that it supports basic features (on/off/dim) but any of the advanced features would be done via some other hub and bridged over. Are there a lot of advanced firmware products out there that tie into HK?