CES 2025: My takeaways for the connected smart home.

In January 2025, I visited the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas to view all the latest products and innovations in consumer technology coming in the upcoming years. As a full-time employee of Nabu Casa working on the Open Home Foundation's Home Assistant project, I was particularly interested in where the IoT landscape is heading for the smart home industry, both in terms of technologies and product innovations.

I was not alone at CES; besides me, four others from Nabu Casa joined, allowing us to explore all the floors of this enormous expo–Talking to as many companies as possible, strengthening existing relationships, and making potential new ones; as we seek to boost and push the Works with Home Assistant program, and finding new products and even whole product categories to integrate with Home Assistant.

Let me tell you a little bit about my views and experiences from visiting this expo.

Home Assistant is getting hotter 🔥

There's no surprise there, right? Home Assistant is showing up at many places around the whole CES expo; the logo is printed on many places 🤩 It was cool to spot the logo–it is a sign of how the industry is taking the Home Assistant open-source project more seriously. Even nicer, I've seen multiple Home Assistant Greens being on display!

A small little Home Assistant meetup was organized as well, which was awesome! Just look at the group picture below! Like... CES was cool, don't get me wrong, but just look at this amazing group of people in this picture! It was an honor to meet all of them 🙏

I want to specifically call out Justin (DrZzs). I've known him since the beginning of my Home Assistant journey many years ago; we even did some live streams together back in the day. It was a true honor 🙏 to meet you in person!

Also, Phil & Rohan, of the Home Assistant Podcast, we go back quite a long time as well. I've been a guest on their show a few times and even took over the show once. These guys are absolutely the nicest and rock even harder in real life. 👊

There are many more amazing people in this picture, like digiblur DIY, The Hook Up, Automated_House, CloudFree, people from Coulisse, and the lovely guys from Apollo Automation. 🤗

This was loads of fun! But let's dive into the actual CES expo...

AI is everywhere

Surprise! (not really) AI is everywhere; every company does its best to be able to slap on the AI 🪄 word on basically everything possible. No company wants to miss out on this hype, and even if they don't have a use case for using AI in their products, they will find something utterly useless to AI-ify so they can show they are aboard this hype train.

Personally, I'm not really triggered by all this AI stuff anymore. I honestly think I'm more bored and annoyed by it right now. Don't get me wrong, I do believe the generative AI era we are in right now is fascinating and can be used for a lot of cool things, but at this point, in my opinion, 95% of the AI-enabled features showing up in all products is pure useless overhyped crap. In a way, it might be fine? I guess the world needs to learn how to put gen AI to use helpfully by trying as much as possible, in as many ways and use cases as we can.

I'm most worried that almost all of this AI stuff out there isn't local and relies on cloud services. These services are expensive to keep up and maintain. Someone has to pay for it in the long run? Are we losing features when they pull the plug? Or do some products stop working? Do they pull the rug and force you into getting a subscription? Or worse... would they sell your data to pay for all of this? Food for thought. 🤔

The best AI "gimmick" I've seen at CES came from a small booth of the VideoLAN project. They are known for the (open source 🎉) VLC Media player, and showed how they can translate subtitles to any video using AI! Now, that is a practical application of AI, and it is very impressive!

Summing up my AI views: It is interesting and needs to find its place. Meanwhile, the market is completely flooded with utterly useless overhyped AI functionality crap that is mostly cloud-dependent and awaiting for the enshitification to happen.

The smart home extends with smart health

While every manufacturer is smacking AI on everything, another bigger theme is visible across the whole smart home industry: the movement from smart home to smart living.

No longer are we only looking at the most innovative light bulbs, vacuum cleaners, or locks, but also sensors one can install in one's toilet to track certain health indicators in your urine, smart scales, dozens of rings, fitness equipment, adult sex toys, and a lot more.

The smart home industry is no longer just about the smart home with our fancy lights, switches, and TVs; it is shifting quite strongly to care about the people who live in it.

This is not entirely new, though. You might have noticed this trend yourself over the last few years: sleep trackers have become the norm, smart watches measure a whole lot more nowadays, and for the smart home, more options have become available to measure air quality at home.

Personally, I think this makes a lot of sense, and I'm curious to see how all this smart health is going to connect up and be integrated with the smart home.

However, I'm also worried about how this hunger for recording medical health data would invade our personal privacy–even within the safe space of our own homes. I can perfectly imagine that not everybody would be OK with integrating smart health into a smart home that has multiple people living in it.

All hail the vacuum cleaners

It is not just the era of AI or smart health. Apparently, vacuum cleaners are the hot thing! I mean... I'm not sure why this is the case, but Oh my god, how many vacuum cleaners could be showcased at a single expo?

This year, some can jump over little bumps in your home, others have a robot arm to move socks out of the way, and another can carry your tablet or humidifier around the house. Okay, the jumping over small bumps thing might be practical; the others may be more of a gimmick IMHO. We are definitely at a point where vacuum cleaners become harder to innovate on.

You have probably seen most of them in all media coverage around CES, as these vacuum cleaners were definitely super prominent and visible. Our buddy Rob, The Hook Up, made quite a nice video that sums up all there is to know about the vacuum cleaners from CES 2025:

Meanwhile, my good old Roborock S5 Max is still going strong, which feels like a piece of ancient history after looking at all of these amazing vacuum cleaners at CES. It makes me wonder if spending a thousand on a new robot vacuum is worth it? 🤔

Does it Matter?

Matter! The “brand-new” smart home standard—though, at this point, it’s not so new anymore. Matter was launched with the promise of solving interoperability between smart home devices, allowing products from different manufacturers to work together seamlessly across platforms like Apple Home, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and, of course, Home Assistant. Instead of worrying about whether a device supports Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Wi-Fi, Matter aims to be the universal standard that just works.

Matter was most definitely a highlight at CES. Many product manufacturers have added support for Matter or are working on adding support for it to their products, which is awesome for us consumers, considering the goal of Matter!

Sounds great, right? Well… in theory... yes.

I visited some of these Matter product manufacturers at their booths and asked them for their views on Matter and the challenges they have faced creating these products. Their responses were shockingly similar.

In almost all cases, Matter is added as an additional feature. This means that almost everyone keeps their existing apps and ecosystems working in tandem. Matter isn’t used as a standalone system; instead, it acts as an additional way for consumers to control their devices.

The first thing I thought was that this made tons of sense, as they don't want to risk breaking the experience of their existing ecosystems. But essentially, they could have just used Matter for this on their end as well. Why didn't they?  The most common response I heard was: “Matter doesn’t support all the features we want to offer.” That might be true, but Matter does support adding custom clusters for that use case. 🤷‍♂️ I think it is more a signal of how "new" Matter still is.

Consumers don't understand Matter yet. We all know and accepted Wi-Fi by now, but Matter? This is a huge problem, and it is not just a teaching problem but also a huge UX problem on all possible levels. Let's be honest: If you see a Matter logo printed on a box in a store, would you know if you can connect it to your home at this point? Most people probably answer this as: "I don't know." The fact that Matter can run over both Wi-Fi and Thread makes it even more confusing.

Thread? In case you don't know what it is: Thread is a low-powered mesh networking wireless radio protocol for efficient communication between smart devices. Unlike Wi-Fi, Thread creates a local, self-healing mesh network where devices can relay signals to one another without relying on a central hub. This makes it more reliable in theory, as there’s no single point of failure, and it’s energy-efficient—ideal for battery-powered devices like sensors and locks.

However, the reality is much messier. Thread requires a Thread Border Router to connect with the rest of the smart home, and different ecosystems (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) all have their own incompatible implementations. The result? Devices often struggle to join the right network, and compatibility issues between Apple, Google, and Amazon’s Thread implementations only add to the frustration.

This makes Thread the Achilles heel of Matter. Every single person I talked to at CES dislikes Thread. It causes a ton of support load, and consumers get stuck and get a shitty user experience. Matter over Thread products have by far the lowest first-time setup success rate for consumers for every single company I spoke to. End users don’t know better and blame Matter for the poor experience, not Thread—which ultimately reflects badly on Matter. Many manufacturers avoid Thread right now for that reason. Hopefully, Thread version 1.4 will help, as it promises to solve many of these issues.

Why Thread is Matter’s biggest problem right now

The fight for who will own your Thread mesh network is creating an even more fractured smart home.

The VergeJennifer Pattison Tuohy

A concerning number of manufacturers create and release bridges/controllers instead of actual Matter end devices. This means that the actual device doesn't support Matter, but a bridge in between does.

For example, Philips Hue does this. Their Hue bridge can talk Matter to other ecosystems, and the bridge will talk to all the Philips Hue lights using Zigbee. Flic makes things even weirder, in my opinion. Their Flic Hubs are not a Matter bridge, but a controller. This means they try to sit in between as a mini-smart home system instead of exposing their Flic Buttons as devices using a bridge.

In the end, I think both harm the promise and vision of Matter. In the case of Philips Hue, they force you to use their bridge and ecosystem, even if you want to use Matter. You still need to create a Hue account and log in with it on your Hue bridge in order to use your Hue lights over Matter. That way, they keep you locked into their ecosystem.

Flic is probably working around Matter's feature limitations this way (their buttons can do a lot), but... a Matter network can only have five controllers (called fabrics)... If everyone takes this route, things will become problematic pretty quickly.

Other manufacturers I spoke with want to avoid certifying every single end device for Matter, as this adds to product costs, which can be prohibitive for smaller companies or start-ups.

While there are a lot of concerns around Matter, it is still relatively new, and even though Thread is a party pooper at this point–Matter definitely has momentum, and I hope that over time, this will help resolve its issues and allow it to truly deliver on its promise.

Energy consumption awareness hotness

Do you know what did matter at CES? Energy! ⚡️Making consumers aware of their energy consumption is no longer a nice concern–it's a key feature of every smart home. While some parts of the world (cough the US cough) are figuring out renewables 🌱 versus fossil fuels 🛢️, the smart home world is clearly moving towards energy efficiency, awareness, and sustainability.

More and more ecosystems focus on helping users track, manage, and reduce their energy usage—whether to lower their environmental footprint or simply save money on rising energy costs. Energy costs are rising worldwide, especially in Europe. 

Samsung is really not the only company. Preserving Mother Earth is a big item for many. From tons of smart plugs that provide real-time energy monitoring, to intelligent thermostats that include real-time power insights and energy-saving features everywhere.

CES wouldn’t be CES without concept cars (and similar ‘vehicles’), and unsurprisingly, they were almost all EVs. In fact, there might have been more EV chargers on display than vacuum cleaners! 😆 If you have an EV, you know it takes a large sum of your total energy usage. Having insights in that, and charging on smart moments is definitely something to save a lot of money on.

With that in mind, I expected to see a lot more solar tech. But aside from some inverters, I didn’t really notice a strong presence for it at CES—though maybe I just missed it… totally possible! What was visible was batteries! 🔋

Besides insights, batteries are showing everywhere. Companies are clearly heating up for a future where homes can store excess energy from solar panels or charge when electricity is cheap and use the stored power when rates are high. I'm not sure if this is an American thing or not, but large portable batteries (the ones with AC outlets on them) were literally everywhere.

I recently received a HomeWizard Plugin-In Battery. This one is specifically aimed at the Dutch market and is specifically created to store excess solar energy. The best thing about it? Just unpack it, plug it into a wall socket, done!

Some other things I've spotted and loved...

As I wrote in the introduction of this article, I've been searching for new things to integrate into Home Assistant. And honestly, I think there is enough choice when it comes to getting a light bulb to integrate into your smart home. But what else could we potentially integrate into our Smart Home? Here are some other small little gems I've spotted.

How about this smart bird feeder by Birdbuddy? 🦜 The camera captures pictures and videos, and the AI identifies the bird species to categorize the visit. I have one in my garden for a bit already, and it is loads of fun for the kids!

Next up is this smart indoor garden by Plantaform 🌱 It really caught my eye at the expo. This extremely nice futuristic-looking pod device is actually a mini garden to grow your own fresh herbs right at home. Just look how beautiful it is:

Unlike LETPOT, Plantaform can't integrate with Home Assistant yet, but I think we will see more of these indoor gardens in our smart homes in the future. It would fit perfectly, especially with notifications for things like giving water (which is why every plant basically dies in my house 🙃).

Talking about water, 💧Hydrific's Droplet, sure enough, looked interesting. This little device can be self-installed by clamping it onto your main water pipe, and it will tell you how much water you are using, and you can even figure out patterns using AI. More importantly, it is able to detect leaks and notify you of those! 🙏 It unfortunately doesn't work with Home Assistant yet; hopefully, that will change someday soon!

Alright, this sums up my report/view of CES 2025. I hope I've been able to deliver my slightly different view/perspective of this massive expo.

What do you expect to see in terms of innovation in the smart home world in the upcoming years?

../Frenck