Yes, I have been extremely disappointed in Hue and I hope they change their minds. It would be one thing if they would flat out say they don’t want to work with us, but the whole, “you need EnOcean in your switch” makes zero sense for an in-wall switch.
We talked to the EnOcean people and even they said it didn’t make any sense to have their technology in the switch, but rather we should work with them for a remote option.
It’s almost like they don’t fully understand what an in-wall switch can do and how it would benefit them. I even made this fancy graph for them, but they still kept saying, “in order to be considered, you need to put EnOcean in your switch”.
So, at this point, I’m just going to take the loss and my hopes are that once these things start flying off shelves, we can have more data to go back to them to show them this is a viable option for them to consider.
It would also be helpful if Hue customers who have the Inovelli switch write in or tweet at them. Maybe then they can adopt a page from our playbook and listen to their customers.
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From a tech side, we were presented with a choice from the engineers:
- Hack their key encryption and force our products to work on their system (essentially going around them)
- Use a third party hub and bypass the Hue gateway
While option #1 is very tempting, and I’m assuming some of the other companies that say they work with Hue (but aren’t Friends of Hue Certified) have done this, my fear is that Hue would catch on and modify their encryption in one of their hub updates and that would cause issues on our end as it’s out of our control – plus, if there ever was a potential of partnering in the future, that would likely be out the door if they caught on to us hacking their encryption.
So, for now, we’ll have to collect as much data as we can around who is using their bulbs with the Inovelli switch and what hub their using to explain to them that they’re missing out on hub sales and people are taking their products outside their ecosystem.
Finally, the next option, which I’m moving forward with is to just create our own ZigBee bulb lineup and build something outside of them. Our Z-Wave manufacturer has an entire suite of bulbs that are amazing and ready to go – we just need the capital to purchase and support them.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.
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EDIT: The one thing we’re exploring is to see if we can use the EnOcean module instead of the SiLabs module. The EnOcean module has the ability to use ZigBee. It definitely won’t happen for our first launch and there are still some follow up questions I have for the EnOcean folks (just sent an email) regarding OTA and Matter, but if it is as simple as swapping the module, it may be something we can explore to, “check the box” with Hue. Still ridiculous, but it is what it is.
