“With connectivity in place, think about what the other building blocks of our system are in general,” he told me two years ago. “Each of the units has, each of them has storage, it’s tied to a really robust cloud and data infrastructure, so you’re able to take advantage of that to do even more.
From there you can see the very, very early beginnings of what a whole home platform needs to look like.”Įero never quite managed to flesh out that vision. Its second-generation routers support a wireless smart home protocol known as Thread, but nearly two years after launch, barely any Thread-compatible devices exist, and support on Eero routers remains buried under advanced settings. Eero also launched a $99 per year subscription service called Eero Plus, which provides network-wide malware filtering, ad blocking, and content screening. This was a fine initial gesture toward router-based applications, but it still hasn’t really expanded beyond the mundane scope of managing network traffic. Amazon’s ascentĪt the same time, Amazon and Google have gone from merely dabbling in smart homes to staging full-scale home takeovers. When Eero started talking up its bigger plans in late 2016, Google had only just gotten into smart speakers, and Amazon’s Echo speaker only worked with a few dozen smart home products. Google Assistant and Alexa integration has since become table stakes for thousands of devices, and both Google and Amazon have been building their own smart home hardware through their Nest and Ring brands.
Their inevitable dominance has likely caused other smart home platform efforts to fall by the wayside. Wink has been floundering ever since getting acquired by will.i.am in 2017 (with its own website not even stocking the Wink Hub central controller), Lowe’s is throwing in the towel on its Iris platform, and even Samsung’s SmartThings seems to be forever waiting for a better version of the Bixby voice assistant to carry it forward. In hindsight, Eero’s grander ideas were never going to flourish without the backing of a tech giant. If you’re a smart home device maker, you can certainly sell some door locks or light bulbs or a security system. You might even be able to monetize those products with some kind of subscription service.
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