Home automation always was and continues to be a puttering around hobby or suckers game.
A friend bought a house that had a late 70s state of the art home system. Central radio/vinyl/8track player, intercoms, and a broken CCTV setup. Also cool stuff like central vacuum.
The big difference between that house and the modern gadgetry is that the 70s stuff was hard wired and still works. None of the IoT crap that is on the market now will be completely unusable in a decade.
My house also came with a 1970s central vacuum system (among other things).
It still works amazingly well for a system that is 40 years old. I've only used it one time, just to test it out, because it's obnoxious to drag a long hose around the house and connect up to each port. In my opinion the concept was bad from the start because of that one thing.
A friend bought a house that had a late 70s state of the art home system. Central radio/vinyl/8track player, intercoms, and a broken CCTV setup. Also cool stuff like central vacuum.
The big difference between that house and the modern gadgetry is that the 70s stuff was hard wired and still works. None of the IoT crap that is on the market now will be completely unusable in a decade.