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posted by martyb on Sunday February 03 2019, @05:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the Smart? dept.

Lowe's is shutting down its Iris smart home platform at the end of March

In a move that may seem obvious in retrospect, Lowe's has decided that its Iris smart home platform is not in fact going to take off. Instead, the home improvement-focused retail chain is shutting the service down on March 31st, 2019 and advising all Iris users to kindly avoid taking their no-longer-functioning products back to a Lowe's store. The company says it will however give you some money back in the form of a prepaid Visa card that will help you "migrate to another smart home platform," reads the company's website.

[...] Alternatively, Lowe's says that a number of the products that are compatible with Iris are also compatible with Samsung's SmartThings platform, and SmartThings is apparently agreed to help with the transition process. Some other Iris products use standard protocols like Zigbee and Z-Wave, notes Android Police, meaning they should also work with other platforms beyond SmartThings if you don't feel like trying to get your money back.

Dumb as a bag of hammers.

Related: Couple Accused of Using Lowes Website Flaw to Steal Expensive Goods
Home Depot Q2 2018 Results Shed Light on U.S. Economy


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @08:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 03 2019, @08:09PM (#795801)

    Home IoT is a dead end. Will be for a long time. For the exact reasons you listed. If you had the 'opportunity' to sit in on meetings with these guys you would realize they have no vision. The only 2 companies out there that could pull off home IoT is maybe Tesla and most certainly Apple. But without jobs that is not necessarily true anymore either.

    Industrial IoT on the other hand is where the money is at. Those dudes are willing to spend money and stick to it. A 10-15 year lifespan is what they expect and will get.

    When I was doing IoT I wrote bridges that would talk to all of the different systems. The second any of the companies started talking about expensive SDKs and 'on site training' we dropped them quick. They usually folded within a year or two. There are dozens at any point in time companies that are trying to 'be the one'. None of the will be. None of them want to have a decent IoT standard bus protocol much less software. They all want to control the stack and not interop much if at all.

    There's bunch of open source software around for it
    Those projects are most certainty cool. But they mostly have mediocre support and poor reporting capabilities. Not bad mind you if you are just fiddling around. But if you want a clean turnkey style system... No one really is building that and not charging every month for it. If I was still messing around with this stuff it is where I would most certainly start though. I have reverted back to simple toggle switches. The rest of the info was just more than I really needed for my use case and just gave me information anxiety.

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