Not even close.
The “general consumer” believes a lot of things that are wrong.
1 Like
Oh I love how statistics can be presented to give what ever out come you desire. I am not saying you are wrong, but I would love to know the total hubs sold for each. If smartThings has sold 5 times more hubs then they are equally as reliable surely?
No, that’s not what that means…and don’t call me Shirley.
2 Likes
Based on industry reports, wink has sold more hubs than SmartThings. ( The numbers I saw in January were 300,000 to around 100,000.) In terms of the number of ratings on Amazon, they’re just about equal, although obviously that’s not a great indicator. Somebody can check the download Numbers in the android store for the two apps as well.
I agree that statistics on a company status page probably don’t mean very much. And again, I personally wasn’t trying to compare the two hubs.
I’m sure @RLDreams is correct and that as a productline wink’s brand managers have been shifting towards the idea of the app as being the important piece. That’s obvious just from looking at the website.
As a network engineer, my interest is in the devices themselves. It’s the reason it drives me crazy whenever anybody says “Phillips hue hub” since that particular device is a bridge, not a hub. 
But most people could care less about that.
Looked at as a hardware device, the “wink hub” which is still being sold is definitely a home automation hub.
Again, I know most people don’t care about things like conformance statements and command sets.
I have no disagreement at all with the idea that Wink has a corporate strategy of moving beyond the physical hub and emphasizing the cloud connections. But I’d have to turn in my IEEE membership card if I said the Wink hub device isn’t a “home automation hub.” 
The perils of knowing too much about something most people don’t care about at all. LOL!
5 Likes
[quote=“JDRoberts, post:24, topic:57319”]
But I’d have to turn in my IEEE membership card if I said the Wink hub device isn’t a “home automation hub.”[/quote]
Or that the Echo is.
2 Likes
I started a new thread to talk about why I like the idea of multiple hubs. Crazy, huh? I thought it was encouraging enough to warrant a separate thread.
3 Likes
How could that be?
1 Like
Wink was displayed and sold at retail outlets, most notably Home Depot and Target, for a year before SmartThings was. It was also featured on their online sites. That gave Wink a big head start.
This is target’s current “smart home” category:
Also Wink is an official Nest partner, another significant market source.
The kind of people who research home automation online for several days before making a purchase would’ve found much more positive technical press about SmartThings. But people who just made an impulse buy because they were thinking about a nest or “smart lighting” without knowing any more than that would probably have encountered wink first up until December 2015.
3 Likes
Also, Wink had a very successful marketing campaign essentially giving Wink hub away (for $1 initially and later for $25) with the purchase of a couple of Link smart bulbs.
4 Likes
Also Wink has better app ratings from more people. Also Wink has local processing
Also Wink works with Lutron Caseta, which is popular
Also Wink works with MyQ, also popular
Also Wink was a lot more active on social media for a long time before ST got the memo
4 Likes
But STs has local processing. Totally. And a migration tool to boot.
NOT POSSIBLE MYQ HAS MADE THIS IMPOSSIBLE IT"S THEIR FAULT>
Well, sort of. They’ve made it difficult and limited.
After 2 years in service I said goodbye to MyQ opener yesterday. I may have used the app once every 3 months to test if it’s still working.
1 Like
Actually, it could be a very well thought out decision if you are after Lutron Caseta switches. The Lutron Hub is more expensive and with Wink you can control a lot more than just Caseta…
1 Like
Good point. That’s actually why our household added wink. We wanted to combine sensors with Lutron switches and wink was the easiest way to do it since staples connect appeared to be dying. As I said, we had really simple use cases, though. Essentially just looking for hands-free control methods in addition to voice.
2 Likes
Well, I had my Echo from the first week they went “limited availability” so there was a lot of waiting and tinkering before ST was finally integrated. If you got one after that I’m sure your experience was more smooth.
I see things like Echo/Alexa as a sort of virtual hub. A real hub is a physical device that his directly communicating with other physical devices (ST hub and Z-wave/Zigbee devices) (Same for Hue/Harmony, etc.). The reason that I’m likening Echo to a virtual hub is that it is not physically controlling anything, but using a bunch of cloud services to virtually communicate. I know it’s not the same on a pure physical level, but at the end of the day to the average end user, you have this thing that allows you to tie a bunch of disparate things together and interact with them from a single point of entry. If I push a button on my phone and ST turns my light on, it feels similar to speaking to my Echo and having my heat go up. Different plumbing by similar end user experiences.
Yes, that is exactly what I meant. When a consumer buys 1 device that allows them to connect and control a bunch of other devices/services they view them similarly. Issue a command to X and X makes Y do something. They just want the sausage, they don’t want to know how it was made.
1 Like
[quote=“vitamincm, post:35, topic:57319”]If I push a button on my phone and ST turns my light on, it feels similar to speaking to my Echo and having my heat go up. Different plumbing by similar end user experiences.
[/quote]
So you also think of your phone (or your PC, or…) as virtual hubs? If so then that pretty much redefines the term into near meaninglessness, as anything that can communicate with these services’ cloud interfaces would qualify.
[quote=“vitamincm, post:36, topic:57319”]
When a consumer buys 1 device that allows them to connect and control a bunch of other devices/services they view them similarly.[/quote]
Oh, I don’t know. Even if I were not as technically inclined as I am, I would know that I bought a ST hub, and based on reading the materials that came with it (necessary to set it up and get it working) I would know what the hub is for, and that it controls the devices I configured it to control. Furthermore, because I have to expose those devices to Alexa via an ST app I know that ST is controlling Alexa’s access to them. I don’t think that I’d be prone to forgetting about the ST hub and what it’s there for simply because I managed to get my Echo working with it (indirectly).
I understand what you’re saying, but even from the nontechnical user’s point of view, Echo’s not a hub. It adds voice control to existing automations that you set up with something else. It doesn’t create new automations that weren’t there before. And if you take it away, all of your automations still exist and can be run from their own apps.
Same reasons Yonomi is not a hub. It can make two things happen at the same time, which is cool, but you have to have set up each of those two things independently in their own control systems.
Right, I know it’s NOT a hub. And I guess we can parse words like “kind of” and “virtual” as to how closely something has to resemble something to qualify forever. Devices like Echo and a few other things need some “category” or term in the whole ecosystem. They’re not dumb endpoints. They have their own brains and the tie certain disparate things together to add capabilities to a lot of platforms. Not sure I have a good suggestion, just a question I guess.
3 Likes
We’ve got about 50 devices on 1 ST hub, not counting Sonos (which isn’t really home automation, IMO). Lights are all Z-wave switches; water devices are all Zigbee. I passed on Hue precisely because it didn’t inter-operate.
Not because I don’t want another hub, but because if Phillips abandons the tech, you’re screwed. Whereas if SmartThings went belly-up tomorrow, you can still port your Zigbee and Z-wave devices elsewhere.
Incidentally, Arlo is apparently now supported on SmartThings, although I’ve heard terrible stuff about their battery life.
EDIT: Random thought… In the online services segment, no one expects one platform to do everything. You do your mail on one site and social media on another. Even when given the opportunity to do more things in one place, consumers will reject it (coughGoogle+cough) if competing implementations are better. I’ve seen industry analysts call this “multihoming” (not to be confused with the IP networking practice) and in the long run it should increase total consumer welfare. More hubs in the home is probably a net positive for consumers in the long run. Even if it means more clutter in the short run.