Invention platform and marketplace Quirky, Inc. has filed for bankruptcy and is looking to sell its assets, which includes Wink, Inc., in the hopes that the smart home hub maker can continue its operations.

If you’re not familiar with Quirky, the best way to describe it is a social hub for inventors who want to get their products made and sold in major retail outlets. You submit your invention, the Quirky community will then help you iron out the kinks by throwing in their two cents, and they will then vote as to whether they would be interested in purchasing your device. Quirky will then back the creation of the inventions with the most votes.

Some notable products that have come out of Quirky include the very accommodating Pivot Power strip, the smart A/C unit Aros and the smart egg keeper Egg Minder, to name a few. Because of the growing smart home market opportunities, Quirky has spun its Wink app into a stand alone company to focus on smart home devices, which spawned two products: the Wink Hub and the Relay smart switch.

Despite the announcement of the bankruptcy, Wink states that operations will continue as usual, with its engineers maintaining work on products. Still, you can’t help but wonder if this bankruptcy filing will have a huge impact on the smart home market, specifically on smart home hubs.

Are smart home hubs doomed?

Wink does not divulge the specifics of its sales numbers, but in an interview with Gigaom from January of this year, Brett Worthington, Wink VP and general manager, stated that during Black Friday and Christmas 2014, about 3,000 Wink Hubs were activated on each day, clocking a new user every 12 seconds and adding 3.5 devices per account.

The number Worthington gave sounds great, and gives the impression that the smart home hub market isn’t in trouble. The Wink Hub is a viable option in the current market, given the variety of products it supports including smart lights from GE, Philips, TCP and Cree; smart switches and sockets from Lutron and Leviton; security and safety products from Nest, Dropcam, and GoControl; smart door locks from Kwikset, Chamberlain, Schlage, and GoControl; smart thermostats from Honeywell, Nest, and Sensi; and many others.

Another interesting trend to consider comes from a report released by Parks Associates, which projects that 2.5 million Western European households will have smart controllers by 2019. Smart controllers is an umbrella term, but still covers the likes of smart home hubs as a unifying method for managing connected devices.

But do people really need a smart home hub today, when many smart home devices themselves are able to connect to existing home routers and be controlled using their own smartphone app?

Limited convenience

For one thing, hubs offer convenience. They allow you to control and monitor all your connected devices on one app, but (and here’s the huge but), smart home hubs are not compatible will all of the smart home devices available in the market. This means purchasing one could limit your options to a pre-selected collection of connected products from the same brand as the smart home hub, or its partners.

There are other smart home hubs in the market such as Vera, HomeSeer, Nexia Home, the newly released SmartThings Hub and Logitech Harmony to name a few, but it’s hard to tell whether they are doing well in the market as sales number are not publicly released.

In a survey commissioned by Bluetooth SIG, it was determined that consumers are more interested in solutions that are easy to use, competitively priced, keep data secure, are easy to set up and connect easily to a mobile device. Home automation hubs aren’t in the top of the list when deciding what device to purchase: typical smart home buys includes smart thermostats, smart light bulbs, and security and monitoring devices. Many of these devices do not need a home automation hub to connect to a home Internet network or use Bluetooth, and allow for remote control and monitoring through smartphone apps.

Hub alternatives

We could be facing a hub-less future if this trend continues. The Internet of Things aim to make our lives simpler with less fuss, which could translate to device consolidation or connected devices linking to something more like a set-top box that could also act as the home automation hub instead of having to purchase two separate devices.

It’s a safe bet that this is where Apple is heading with its Apple TV, considering the new version comes with Siri support, and a remote with touch and gesture control. Apple’s HomeKit could well be integrated as a central control hub for smart homes, with its operating system tvOS to add home automation support that supports Siri, touch or gesture control to turn connected appliances on or off. Right now, HomeKit supports seven brands which includes Lutron, ecobee, iDevices, Insteon and others plus support for more are coming this fall. Also some independent home automation startups have pledged support for the platform.

Another device that may put hubs in their graves is the Amazon Echo, a device that has been described as the Siri for your whole house. First and foremost, the Amazon Echo is a speaker that allows you to play music from your mobile device. It is a learning device powered by Amazon’s cloud-based voice service Alexa, which uses voice commands to play songs. It now supports connected devices such as connected lights from Philips, Osram and a light switch from Insteon, but you still need a separate hub to set up and control these devices. In the future, the need for a separate hub may be removed as the Amazon Echo could fill that void.

Looking at the past, it may seem like the smart home hub is doomed. When Nest acquired Revolv, the hub was immediately discontinued. But then again, when Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. acquired SmartThings, the hub was not discontinued but was instead released as a new version.

To hub or not to hub

As mentioned earlier, some home automation devices do not need a hub to operate, as the device connects with your mobile device directly via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi like the Lumen or LuMini bulbs. Turn the bulbs on or off, change the color, or sync it with your phone’s notification so you’ll know if you’e getting a message or someone liked your Facebook post.

Question now is, do you really need a smart home hub?

CNET has recently bought a house which it plans to turn into the ultimate smart home, and though it has chosen the SmartThings hub as the one, it states that unless you are completely sold on the whole home automation business, getting a smart hub shouldn’t be the first smart home investment on your list.

“[I]f you’re more interested in easing into home automation, I strongly suggest skipping over the hub step entirely. Instead, I’d pick one category that interests you the most — climate, lighting, security, etc. — and expand from there as you see fit,” CNET‘s Megan Wollerton suggests.

Will crowdfunding save the day?

Even before the bankruptcy filing, Quirky had suspended development of inventions, leaving some inventors to seek other paths for getting their product to market.

One area inventors could look into is crowdfunding. The recently refiled Kickstarter PBC and Indiegogo, Inc. are two such services that have helped many get their products to consumers.

A quick search on Kickstarter for smart home products will reveal that there are 128 such projects that launched on the platform, with about 24 of those a form of smart home hub or a unifying controller for smart devices. Half of those smart home hub projects were successfully funded and some have been successfully delivered to backers such as Almond+, Musaic and Neurio. Some of these are still being developed like Neeo, but some have ceased communication with backers, while others have delivered faulty products.

As for Indiegogo, there is an abundance in smart devices in the service from home automation to fitness tracker and other connected solutions, but there seems to be fewer smart home hub projects on the service. Of the few smart home hubs on Indiegogo, many of those have not reached their funding goal, but some were successfully funded and will soon be delivering products to backers.

Though it can be quite disheartening to read about unsuccessful funding and unfulfilled promises, inventors should take this news in stride and come up with a better plan as to how to improve their products so they can deliver a solution that will be impossible to ignore.

Photo by krossbow