
Smartphone ≠ smart home - jansen
https://medium.com/@senic/smartphone-smart-home-3b5af00c1bfd
======
untog
Smartphone controlled _anything_ never feels great to me. If I have to type in
code to unlock my keypad, then wait for an app to launch, _just_ to change the
temperature on the thermostat, it's already over.

On a similar note, I wanted to love the Chromecast, but I found the phone to
be a terrible controller. Now I use a Roku, which has a great remote. Instead
of my girlfriend and I crowding ourselves around a tiny smartphone screen to
browse what we're going to watch, we bring up the Netflix app on the Roku and
browse on the much more suitable TV.

~~~
coldtea
> _Smartphone controlled anything never feels great to me. If I have to type
> in code to unlock my keypad, then wait for an app to launch, just to change
> the temperature on the thermostat, it 's already over._

For one, newer smartphones will mostly come with fingerprint sensors. So no
code typing there.

Second, apps launch almost instantly in any recent iOS or Android phone. It's
not like you'll wait 1 minute for he app to launch or anything.

Third, "it's already over" over typing and app-launching wait time? Oh, the
humanity. I've lived in houses where the thermostat was in a specific room, or
even in the basement next to the heater.

~~~
tmuir
Some of the first world problems of HN users using technology are beyond the
pale. I was arguing mouse vs remote/phone for playing media on a media server,
and someone's retort was that a mouse would require them to have a surface
upon which to use the mouse at their couch. I've spent way too much time
envisioning this mythical surfaceless couch and person.

~~~
polynomial
Not that I spend a lot of time on couches, mine or others, but even if there
is a "usable" surface nearby (I have no surfaces near my couch) it's usually a
coffee table with terrible ergonomics for use as a controller plane.

But this doesn't seem like a major issue, since it really seems a tablet (or
just your phone) solves the problem.

~~~
tmuir
Wait, what are these unusable surfaces? I have a $25 logitech wireless mouse
and keyboard that I use roughly 8ft from the usb receiver. Besides the screen
of my monitor, I actually cannot find a surface in my direct vicinity that my
mouse doesn't track extremely well upon. This includes jeans, shirt, skin,
paper towel, microfiber, drywall, carpet, rug, whiteboard, a glass coffee
table (surprisingly), and books.

How can the capabilities of something as cheap, commoditized, and refined as a
computer mouse vary so much that some people's mice are only usable on a small
and inconvenient set of surfaces, while other mice have completely mastered
the process to the point that nearly every surface imaginable works
flawlessly?

~~~
polynomial
Indeed, perhaps I am being fussy about what kind of surface I prefer to use,
and how precise I like the tracking to be.

I am inspired by your reply however to try to find another mouse which works
well on glass, that would literally be a game changer.

------
dangrossman
Instead of a $99 custom button, what about a sub-$99 Android tablet? You can
put them anywhere you'd put the button, and leave your home control app
running with the screen set to never turn off. Turning on/off a light with a
touch will then be no more effort than flicking a light switch -- there's
nothing to take out of your pocket, no waiting for an app to open.

This is how my home works. I built the app that runs on the screens all the
time (a little node.js server and web app), and have a few tablets mounted on
the walls. This is a screenshot from October:

[http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-
content/uploads/home2.png](http://www.dangrossman.info/wp-
content/uploads/home2.png)

Since then, I've added a bunch of new controls for dimmable lights and scenes
(e.g. turn off all the first floor lights at once, or dim them all to the same
percentage).

I built my own, but there are dozens of free pre-built home control apps in
the Play Store. I find Wink's very attractive for example:
[http://i.imgur.com/DUWIwh3.png](http://i.imgur.com/DUWIwh3.png)

~~~
markbao
This is really awesome and a good example of a cheap Android device as glass
for software (what a world). Do you just have it instant-on when you push the
power button? What about having it automatically wake up when you pick it up?
(Since yours is a web-app, it might require you to use something like Tasker
to do it.)

~~~
dangrossman
I mounted the tablets on walls with $10 kits from Amazon that use those 3M
removable strips to hold the mounts, and drilled small holes for charging
cords. I have the screens set to never turn off, and leave the browser open.
So all the buttons are always just there on the wall, ready to be pressed.
Nothing needs to wake up first.

BTW, Windows 8 8" tablets are now under $100 at Wal-Mart and Best Buy, so you
aren't even limited to Android for this kind of thing anymore.

~~~
markbao
Hah, that's amazing. Great solution. If I had a house, I'd put together
something like that, but with a Qi wireless charger with the magnet holding it
up (hopefully strong enough).

Still waiting for home automation widgets to come down in price so I have an
excuse to install a lot of them in my apartment.

------
joeframbach
I have my previous-generation phone that I don't use anymore, plugged in,
connected to wifi, on a shelf. It's an integrated combination of screens,
speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces, _and_
solves the multi-user issue because it's out in the open on a shelf, and it's
not my personal device anymore so I don't have sensitive information on it.
The apps are right on the home screen, no passcode, just a direct-to-the-app
experience.

You can find a used nexus one, or a moto e, for example, on Swappa for less
than $100.

------
jsnk
"We believe that the future of smart homes will not be found in a centralized
device but in an integrated combination of screens, speech recognition,
sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces."

I think the latter part of the sentence unintentionally describes smartphones.
I would say that today's smartphones are integrated combination of screens,
speech recognition, sensors, dedicated devices and smart surfaces. Pretty damn
good as well.

I take issue with the first part of the sentence as well. I think we do want a
centralized device with centralized software. People are sick of fridge
operating one way and stoves working another. Take changing clocks on
microwave, coffee machine, fridge, stoves etc for example. Don't you just hate
doing it one by one? Not to mention the fact that they all have different
interfaces and work differently.

~~~
twald
Hey, one of the founders here. When we talk about integrated, we're talking
about sensors integrated in the materials like tables and walls around us. It
does not mean that all of these components should be integrated in one device.
I did not phrase this well enough. Thanks!

I agree that we want a centralized intelligence. I personally don't want to
carry my smartphone around all the time though. We can't we use what's around
us like glass, tables walls or use small projectors that track your
positioning?

~~~
VLM
"I personally don't want to carry my smartphone around all the time though"

There is an interesting cultural phenomena where a significant fraction of the
population agrees with us, and another significant fraction thinks we're
completely crazy, and the two groups do not believe the opposite party exists.

------
PinguTS
What I am missing with all the smart home thing and only the Nest has done
right is, that the smartphone is a personal thing. But switch on a light or
similar is not a personal thing, if you are living with a family with kids. In
particular if you have smaller kids, which don't have a small device and must
be able to switch on the light or similar.

There are so much levels in terms of a smart home, that a smartphone will
never be able to handle, because the later one is only a personal thing.

~~~
k__
Also, stuff like light doesn't need explicit interaction most of the time.

If there are people in a room and it's dark, the light should go on.

That's the default case I want almost every time for every room.

I don't want to use my smartphone or do any activities for this.

------
krohling
I noticed a lot of these comments ended up referencing challenges with
lighting so I figured it would be good to chime in here (caveat: co-founder @
emberlight.co).

Interaction models are something we've been thinking about quite a bit and
we've been exploring a number of options. New products like Senic that explore
new opportunities are especially exciting for us. Here are 3 rough tenants
we've been following when thinking about how people will interact with our
product:

    
    
       1) The smartphone is not the solution, it's a stop on the way to something much better.  This is basically the point of OP's article and we completely agree.
       2) If it's not broken, don't fix it.  In other words, if there's an existing interaction model in the home that everyone is already used to (i.e. light switch, tv remote, wall thermostat) seriously ask yourself if that really (really) needs to change before inventing something new.
       3) In slight opposition to #2 there are obviously huge opportunities to innovate the way we interact with our home.  Some of the models that I'm quite excited about:
    
             -The "dashboard" model that Sentri is building (http://sentri.me)
             -The "voice" model: (i.e. Echo, API.ai, etc.)
             -The "gesture" model which is what Senic and a few others are building
    

We're actively researching many of these and building some very cool
partnerships in this space for exactly this reason. I think the end result
will end up being some combination of these models and perhaps others that
I've missed.

Btw, feel free to reach out directly for thoughts/questions/coffee:
kevinr@emberlight.co

------
compumike
The connected lightbulb example is great. That's IoT as a novelty; it adds
few/trivial new capabilities, and it adds a lot of inconvenience.

The flipside of this is IoT as a superpower: finding applications where you
can truly use technology to give people a new ability that they didn't have
before.

From the personal side, this IoT novelty versus superpower discrepancy is
something we thought a lot about as we brought Pantelligent to the world
(note: co-founder,
[https://www.pantelligent.com/](https://www.pantelligent.com/) ). Our
superpower is to let anyone cook great food, perfectly every time, through
science. For us, the smartphone was the perfect user interface, because people
are already in the kitchen with smartphone in one hand and spatula in the
other! But our integration with the Pebble smartwatch hints at an even better
future fit; the Pebble is great for cooking because it's waterproof, and it
lets us bring real-time cooking data and instructions right to your wrist,
even if your hands are busy.

~~~
bbcbasic
IoT idea that I would buy:

I have solar panels. I need to regulate energy use to be as much during the
day as possible (on sunny days) but keep the total load below 3kw at any time
(otherwise I need to go to the grid for extra power).

Make me a system that can turn on the dishwasher, washing machine, pool pump
etc at the right time to minimize my electricity bill.

Bonus cred for checking the weather in my exact location, and taking into
account coming cloud cover.

I'd pay up to $500 for such a device IF it also generated stats and told me
how much solar energy I used as well as my export to the grid.

~~~
minthd
It's probably something that needs to be built inside appliances.It's called
"demand response"(with relation to coal power, but the same tech should apply
for solar power), and there's a big push behind it , including bills.

------
blacksmith_tb
Well, sure, bad interfaces to 'smart home' devices will be unpleasant to use.
But most things like Wemo, Hue, etc. still let you hit their wall switch.
Their 'smartness' is additive, if you have a screen to control them with.

Clearly the reason many connected devices expect you to bring your own screen
is cost - Nest notwithstanding, adding touchscreens to everything when you've
already got one in your pocket seems unnecessary, and would clearly add to
price of these products.

~~~
twald
I agree. And that's exactly one of the big changes that are happening. Prices
for hardware components and manufacturing are dropping and we now have the
ability to think about more suitable interfaces. I stopped using my lifx after
a week because I did not have a fast and simple interface to control them.

------
icegreentea
I think its perfectly expect-able that an actual smart home be accessible
through a variety of modalities and methods. There's no reason why there
shouldn't be smartphone access. But there's also no reason why there shouldn't
also be the ability to use voice commands (not through your smartphone),
direct wall controls, 'dumb' (relatively) physical remotes, etc etc.

For example, I don't always walk around my house with my phone. Sometimes I
wear pants/shorts without pockets. Or I have to leave my phone plugged in
somewhere cause it's charging. Or maybe cause I'm taking a shower and realized
that I may have left the oven on and my roommate is out and I left my phone in
my bedroom, and it would be awesome to be able to yell a question to my house
and just have to dealt with. Or I have friend over and I want them to be able
to play around with some of the coolness, but I don't want to fuck around with
getting them to install the app, and syncing the authentication code, etc etc.

I mean, we can 'argue' about cost. But seriously, you're wiring up your house
for automation and remote access. Enabling additional access nodes is a
relatively tiny opportunity cost.

------
bbcbasic
I have a really great UX for controlling lighting in my home. So simple my 2
year old understood it when she was just 12 months.

Maybe it's top secret, worthy of some serious VC. But you can probably guess
what it is :-)

Now smart phones - she gets those too but she finds it so annoying. Adverts on
youtube serve to cause confusion. That action bar on the Android is annoying.
She says 'waaah' when the screen is locked. Etc.

~~~
twald
You can't be possibly talking about a light switch, right? :) That's exactly
what I'm talking about. I want something as simple as a light switch to
control the colors of my lifx, Hue or control my sonos speakers.

~~~
jpindar
[http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/the-range/hue-tap/](http://www2.meethue.com/en-
us/the-range/hue-tap/)

~~~
bbcbasic
This is literally a toy.

------
scrumper
I agree with the author's thesis, that smartphones, as generic information
processing tools, offer poor user interfaces for controlling things in our
physical environment.

 _Now, the cost and effort to manufacture hardware is dropping and we have the
ability to create interfaces that are not designed as a generic device but
designed for a specific person or situation._

This feels very true. The music industry has been taking advantage of this for
a while, with all kinds of interesting and innovative tactile controllers
interacting with music making software. In that domain companies like Native
Instruments are addressing exactly the concerns raised by this article.
(Interestingly, the author cites playing music as an example of how an
appropriately-crafted physical device (i.e. an instrument) lets the operator
focus entirely on the task by minimizing cognitive load.)

------
seltzered_
You didn't mention the smartwatch at all in your essay. As someone living with
one (a pebble) daily for the past year, many of the smarthome needs have been
extending into working with the smartwatch, and they don't have the painpoints
you describe.

Just as an example - for changing volume on my pebble, i do this:

1) long-hold the up-button (i have this binded to an app called 'music boss' )

2) hit up or down.

3) volume changes.

There's similar apps for controlling smart lightbulbs, etc, and pretty much
expect this to be standard case on android wear / apple watch / microsoft band
/ etc. in the coming months.

Is there a "multi-user" factor missing that makes a case for products like
Senic Flow? Yes, but that wasn't addressed in the essay.

~~~
twald
You're right. I'm going to talk about them in particular in a follow up post.
I wear a pebble as well and I used to use it to control volume. I see
smartwatches taking a big place in smart homes. Our issues were that they were
not a shared control, you still had to use vision as your primary sensor
input, battery life, screen size and problems with connectivity. But I'm
confident some of these issues will be resolved soon.

~~~
erohead
I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow)
to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.

~~~
seltzered_
Yep. I'm really seeing a near-term future of using a touchpad or kinect-like
device for control, but more importantly paired with the smartwatch for
vibration feedback / engaging into a gesture mode. There's no hard rule that a
watch has to only connect to a smartphone.

And if you look at the Apple's acquisition of Primesense (kinect-sensor folks)
and upcoming introduction of 'Taptics' into the Apple Watch, my guess is that
these things will work together.

I've been trying to prototype this as an experimental addon to my touch plugin
thimbleup.com (and sure, I'd love to eventually make it work with Senic Flow
too). Testers have noted making continuous gestures/controls need a bit of
'stickiness' to it -- something that makes the gesture feel that if you use it
enough, you don't have to rely solely on your eyes. A smartwatch takes care of
that if it can manage the battery-life of being a low-latency bluetooth mode
to get feedback data quickly,

------
nrau
I completely agree with the author here, far too much weight has been placed
on the smartphone as the control device and UI for everything.

This problem has even spread to Sonos which discontinued the dedicated
controller a year or so ago. You now have to use either a phone, tablet, or a
full computer to select and choose the music you want to play. Granted their
apps are well done but the overall experience is nowhere as responsive as the
dedicated controller.

I really do not understand their decision, and would think it would be
possible to offer a dedicated controller device these days at a reasonable
price that they can make profitable.

------
pbreit
I found myself in agreement with the post but then when I saw the flow it
looked far too general purpose. And as a computer input device it looks like a
nonstarter (sorta like leap). I was envisioning some very specific tasks.

------
HorizonXP
This article was a great summarization of the problems we face in our startup.

We actually haven't yet built a smartphone app, even though our customers have
asked for it, simply because we don't know a good way to solve these problems.

Do you take the money and build the app anyway, or come back to them with a
new and very different solution to what they asked for?

Take this problem, and apply it to an entire building of office tenants, and
you can see why this is valuable to them. But it's one thing for us to create
a product and make the sale. It's more important to me that they actually
_use_ what we sell them.

------
crazypyro
I will say that I think Leap motion[0] is another really well made
"controller" that would be great for smart homes. It just "works" with their
code out of the box. You can easily tell how many fingers someone has, whether
they are tapping, grabbing, a couple other gestures, their 3 dim location
relative to the camera, etc. I used one at a hackathon a few months back to
attempt a Theremin and it was quite fun.

[0][https://www.leapmotion.com/](https://www.leapmotion.com/)

~~~
prawn
Interesting idea applying that to homes. Instead of the device
watching/scanning out from a monitor to a keyboard surface, it could be a
panel on a wall in your kitchen that recognises gestures performed nearby
(like in the cubic foot in front of it).

I could imagine that learning gestures to control doors, blinds, background
music, lighting and wake/sleep procedures like locking all doors, fading
lights, putting devices on standby, etc.

------
dicroce
It's 2014 (almost 2015). It's time my house knows to turn the hallway light on
FOR me because it's night time and I'm walking in that direction.

~~~
lucaspiller
Using a system like Z-Wave you can already do this. The problem is that as you
need a lighting controller, multiple motion sensors and a base station it's
not cheap - mainly due to licensing fees.

~~~
VLM
"mainly due to licensing fees."

I did that a bit more than decade ago with misterhouse using linux on my
basement fileserver and X10 devices. Now I'd use insteon because its transport
protocol is more reliable. AFAIK there are no license fees.

The expense is in labor. Set up and aiming IR sensors takes more time than
writing the "program" for misterhouse. The inevitable labor expense of
troubleshooting and fine tuning is huge. This is the main limiter for my own
home automation. In the long run controlling my tropical fish tank and the
security sensor lights that light the walk from my garage to the house pays
off. My hallway to the bathroom doesn't pay off for labor. I hooked up the
basement door sensor and got it to work and still haven't hooked up or
automated the basement stairs light yet. Its a labor cost thing.

There are also severe depreciation/lifespan issues... a lot of non-automated
hardware is designed, built, installed and paid for on the assumption of a
20-30 year working life. Most of the "new wave" of home automation is built to
last till the runway runs out or the aquihire, maybe a year lets say. In the
long run that is not going to help the entire market.

------
dasil003
Well, I don't think anyone ever said smartphone cameras were better than point
and shoot from any UX aspect, but that hasn't stopped them from winning.

~~~
dllthomas
It turned out "ever present" was the most important UX aspect.

------
andars
I feel like I must be missing something about the concept of a "smart home".
Why can't I just leave the light switch (or any other controller) how it is
and just have an additional Internet-based fancy control for automation or use
when I am away from home? I don't see the need for any new control interfaces
for things I can already control perfectly well.

------
coldtea
> _Smart homes are not a thing of the future anymore. Right now, 100 “things”
> per second are connecting to the internet. By 2020, more than 250 things
> will connect each second._

Probably unpopular in a programming forum, but, aside for people with physical
difficulties, did anyone (e.g. more than a few outliers, not literally anyone
as in > 0) ever asked for a "smart home"?

And before someone replies with the quote about "faster horsers", did anyone,
AFTER shown one, went anything but "meh"?

Anybody that show not just as "nice to have, ok, move on", on the level of
battery powered toothbrushes, but as something that really impacts your life.

Seems more to me, like a few other things in tech, like a solution in search
of a problem. In the say way nobody asked or wanted those "if you want to talk
about your credit card, press 3", etc, automated speech recognition call
services.

~~~
vitaflo
Depends how you phrase the question. Do I want a water sensor by my sump pump
that will alert me if it overflows? Yes. Do I want to have my garage door
close automatically if I forget to close it? Yeah that makes me feel safer. Do
I want to be able to set the thermostat when I'm not at home? Yeah, that's
handy.

Do I want to turn on lights, lock the doors, or raise the temp when I'm
actually at home with a smartphone? No, that's just silly.

------
shurcooL
Smartphones are not a good way to control things in the real world because
there's no tactile feedback. So the only feedback is on the screen, which you
have to look at, instead of the real world thing you're controlling.

------
julianpye
NFC would be a great intermediate solution to address this problem. Here's
hoping that at the next WWDC, Apple will open up their NXP chip to everyone.

------
shmerl
Is it just me? I find the term "smartphone" to be rather dumb. I prefer to
call them handset computers.

