I still have a lot of the same stuff I bought, which falls into two main categories:
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.
I would be interested in Hue, except Philips sold me an earlier iteration of a smart lamp which I loved for its ability to gently wake me up in the morning by slowly turning up the light. I love waking up without a loud alarm clock. In fact, I loved that so much I invested in a smart home hub to get Hue bulbs, and then Philips promptly bricked my original lamp. Unless I eventually bought a fancier home hub, which could grandfather it in!
No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.
FWIW I use a lot of Hue in my house, and I've not had that experience. But absolutely validate the frustration. That said, in the present, Hue seems to be one of the most if not the most stable ecosystems for smart lighting. Which isn't to say it's perfect but I have far fewer problems than most people I'm friends with, haha.
My Hue system is pretty good at my house, my complaints are:
(1) After a momentary power outage all the lights wind up switched on. It happens a lot at 3am and it's annoying as hell to get up at night and turn all the lights off. I really ought to program my homelab server to check the light status when it comes up and if > 80% of the lights are on between 11am and 6am it oughta turn them all off or maybe return the system to a snapshot of where it was before the power down event.
(2) The hue hub crashes every month or so, it always comes up after being power cycled except for the time that my son blew the circuit breaker screwing around with guitar amps. Now that I think about it I oughta put a WiFi smart plug on it so my homelab can reboot it.
(3) When things go wrong my wife becomes dependent on me which is a hassle, particularly when I am out of town. It's one of those things like having a home theater that requires two remote controls and then finding your family can't manage to watch TV anymore. (God, I want to punish everybody in the electronics industry that anything to do with Logitech Harmony going away)
(4) I'm the only one at home that notices it, but the color rendering of RGB lights is terrible. If you want good color rendition of things in the environment you want a spectrum which is smooth like a black body spectrum but if you want strong RGB effects you want three laser-like lines so you can get a good choice of saturated colors.
In ordinary life it doesn't matter a lot but my arts n' crafts involve making fine sensory distinctions like I load this paper into my inkjet printer
and one side is a little more whitish and less mottled and the other side is a little yellowish and you can really see the paper grain... if you've got a very bright light with good color rendering it is easy to tell the difference but under RGB lights it is difficult. And of course if you are evaluating the quality of prints or clothes or something you want the best CRI you can get.
* Hue bulbs, which get active updates and are still maintained by Philips, and honestly are pretty good, if insanely overpriced, especially the HomeKit bridge
* "iHome" smart outlets which I belieeeeeeeve were once upon a time made by Belkin? They've ended support but the outlets themselves are very reliable, and pairable/managable entirely within the Home app so I barely noticed when they were discontinued. Picked up a 4-pack of them on fleabay recently for $20 and they work great still.
Mind you I'm not saying I'm great at this, if anything I'm lucky in that I really haven't had any smart home tech go poorly for me, apart from some other outlets that were some no-name brand. They're still kicking around my house but they need power cycles far more often than the iHome ones.