But good luck building a larger platform around those products now. You might even be able to monetize those products with some kind of subscription service. If you’re a smart home device maker, you can certainly sell some door locks or light bulbs or a security system. In hindsight, Eero’s grander ideas were never going to flourish without the backing of a tech giant. Wink has been floundering ever since getting acquired by will.i.am in 2017 (with its own website not even stocking the Wink Hub central controller), Lowe’s is throwing in the towel on its Iris platform, and even Samsung’s SmartThings seems to be forever waiting for a better version of the Bixby voice assistant to carry it forward. Their inevitable dominance has likely caused other smart home platform efforts to fall by the wayside. Google Assistant and Alexa integration has since become table stakes for thousands of devices, and both Google and Amazon have been building their own smart home hardware through their Nest and Ring brands. When Eero started talking up its bigger plans in late 2016, Google had only just gotten into smart speakers, and Amazon’s Echo speaker only worked with a few dozen smart home products. ![]() Amazon’s ascentĪt the same time, Amazon and Google have gone from merely dabbling in smart homes to staging full-scale home takeovers. This was a fine initial gesture toward router-based applications, but it still hasn’t really expanded beyond the mundane scope of managing network traffic. Eero also launched a $99 per year subscription service called Eero Plus, which provides network-wide malware filtering, ad blocking, and content screening. Its second-generation routers support a wireless smart home protocol known as Thread, but nearly two years after launch, barely any Thread-compatible devices exist, and support on Eero routers remains buried under advanced settings. From there you can see the very, very early beginnings of what a whole home platform needs to look like.”Įero never quite managed to flesh out that vision. “Each of the units has, each of them has storage, it’s tied to a really robust cloud and data infrastructure, so you’re able to take advantage of that to do even more. “With connectivity in place, think about what the other building blocks of our system are in general,” he told me two years ago. This could be useful for all kinds of things, from instantaneous control over smart home devices to an Alexa-like local voice assistant that didn’t have to send every command to the cloud. Eero’s access points, he said, had a lot more computing power than what was necessary for Wi-Fi, in theory paving the way for a distributed home computing platform. I’ve interviewed Eero CEO Nick Weaver on several occasions, and each time he emphasized that mesh routers were just one building block in a broader platform. In getting devoured by Amazon, Eero has effectively given up pursuing that vision on its own, and is instead becoming a pawn in Amazon’s turf war against Google and Apple. ![]() Eero once dreamed of being more than just a router maker, and saw its hardware as the gateway to a future operating system for the home. ![]() And if you were worried about the long-term viability of a router that constantly turns to the cloud for network optimizations, the backing of a cloud computing giant should put those fears to rest.Īt the same time, the news should be a letdown to anyone who’s rooting for more scrappy competition in consumer tech, and less dominance by tech giants. They’ll almost certainly become cheaper now, just like Ring’s doorbell cameras did after Amazon bought that startup last year. Eero’s mesh router systems, which saturate a home with Wi-Fi coverage through multiple access points, currently start at $300 for a two-pack. In the short term, the purchase gives consumers plenty to look forward to.
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