Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users’ smart homes

Insteon has vanished.

The company abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking cloud- dependent smart- home setup without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts.

A smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. The core of the company was Insteon's propriety networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives. The company used both a 900 MHz wireless protocol and powerline networking to create a more reliable network. The Insteon Hub would allow you to use the Insteon app.

Smartlabs and Insteon seem to share the same executives. The website smart home.com is owned by Smartlabs Inc., which licenses the name of the smart lighting brand from Nokia.

Rob Lilleness was installed as CEO after the acquisition of Smartlabs Inc. archive.org still has the announcement, even though Insteon scrubbed the post from its website.

Users have stopped working on automations and schedules because of the Insteon app being down. The worst thing that can happen is that wall switches become dumb. It is possible to control the devices locally without the app because the Insteon protocol has been reverse engineered for a while now. It is possible to return the smarts and remote access to your home from another platform's hub controller.

Home Assistant is an open source home server that you control, so nothing like this can happen to you again. Homebridge can get Insteon working with HomeKit, and OpenHab is another open source option.

If you want to move your hardware to another system, don't factory reset your Insteon Hub. The initial setup may now fail because contacting Insteon's server is a key step. Home Assistant has a warning on its page. It reads.

The Insteon company has shut down and turned off their cloud as of April 2022. Do not factory reset your device under any circumstances as it will not be recoverable.

With the official forums dead, users on the /r/insteon subreddit are processing their collective grief, and that is probably the biggest community out there for help. Everyone is in the same boat and looking at a lot of different options.

A smart home company shutdown is never easy. Many customers invested hundreds of dollars into this formerly multimillion-dollar Ecosystem; suddenly closing up shop like a bunch of fly-by-night grifters would be an unacceptable way to treat paying customers. More communication will be forthcoming.

The company could have given everyone a month's notice that it was going out of business. It could have documentation to help users get started on another system. It could have given forum members the chance to organize on another site.

That did not happen. Instead, Insteon left customers and their gear in the lurch.