For the life of me I don't understand why "smart home" technology is so fucking brain-dead.

Companies have been working on this shit for years. I started with Apple Homekit. But it was so horrendously fucking shitty that I abandoned it within a week. I then moved on to a piecemeal system where I bought the best parts from each manufacturer, then used a half-dozen apps to control everything. Sure the parts couldn't work very well together, but at least they worked! Eventually I took a leap with INSTEON, and it was pretty great. everything worked together and things happened practically instantaneously (hence the name). It was perfect. Until it was discontinued.

At which point I went back to Apple HomeKit. Even though nothing had changed. Once HomeShit, always HomeShit. Everything was slow. Scenes and actions were glacially slow. After living with INSTEON, this was torture.

But I bought into it because it was promised that eventually HomeKit would transition to the new "Matter" smart home standard, which was a massive initiative by dozens of smart home companies that would guarantee everything would work together. To be sure I could jump onboard, I made doubly-sure that everything I bought was able to be upgraded to Matter when the time came. This meany mostly buying everything from Eve Smart Home.

After waiting and waiting and waiting, Eve made their motion sensors the first device that could be upgraded to Matter. So I grabbed one of the two sensors I owned, did the upgrade, and... fail. It was bricked. Wouldn't work any more. Nothing I tried would bring it back, so I put it in a drawer, said several curse words, and resigned myself to sticking with HomeKit, no matter how fucking shitty it is.

Until last week.

I grabbed that motion sensor out of the drawer and attempted to bring it back to life. And failed again and again. Then I found a comprehensive list of things people did to get their device working again after upgrading to Matter and tried them. Nothing worked. So then I decided to try all the suggestions at the same time.

I shut down all my HomeKit hubs. I made sure my router was able to process IP6 addresses then rebooted it. I rebooted my phone. Then I started my preferred HomeKit hub (my AppleTV). Then I pulled up my Eve Matter ID number for the motion sensor... and... there we go. I was able to add it back to my HomeKit configuration.

I shudder to think how much time I wasted on this stupid bullshit.

And so now I've given up on Matter. It's far, far more trouble than it's worth, so I just don't give a crap any more. HomeKit may be flakey as hell, but it mostly works, and since that's the best I can hope for, I guess I'm done.

Which brings me back to the question of the decade: Why is it so damn difficult to get a smart home system to work and stay working?

Maybe one day a company will finally figure it out. But right now I'd be happy with something that was better than what we've got now.