Aliro is the new CSA digital key standard for smart locks. Here's what it solves at the front door, and why wired KNX still runs the rest of the house.

Split-unit air conditioners have always been the one appliance left outside whole-home KNX automation. Universal IR gateways like Intesis and direct wired gateways like Airzone's Aidoo KNX are closing that gap for good.

Home Assistant's 2026.8 update polished the interface: port 80 by default, Matter doorbell events, a cleaner Cloud page. Good work, but interface polish and reliable automation architecture are two different jobs.

Here we go again. Samsung's SmartThings quietly posted a blog update in June announcing that its API, the thing that lets other platforms talk to your SmartThings-connected devices, stops being free in October 2026. Individual, non-commercial developers will pay $4.99 a month. Commercial partners get their own paid tiers, details still to come. If you only ever use the official SmartThings app, nothing changes for you. If your smart home talks to SmartThings through anything

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported yesterday that Apple is preparing to ship three home products between October and early next year: a refreshed Apple TV 4K, an updated HomePod mini, and, finally, an all-new smart home hub built around Siri AI. I say finally because this device has been “coming soon” since 2021. I covered the last delay myself back in July, when the hub reportedly slipped to September because the new Siri wasn't ready. This report reads differently. It names t

Every automation platform launch this year has pitched the same future: talk to your house, and it listens. Alexa+ remembers your preferences across sessions. Google folded its camera AI into a paid tier. The entire industry is racing toward voice and AI as the interface, as if pressing a button is something we're all meant to grow out of. KNX Association published a piece in May making the opposite case, and I think they're right. Tactile buttons aren't a legacy holdover wai

Two of the biggest smart home companies on the planet just ran a live demonstration of what "your house runs on someone else's server" actually means, and it happened this year, not in some hypothetical future. Starting in February, Amazon opened Alexa+, its generative AI assistant, free to its entire US Prime base, more than 200 million members. Multiple outlets reported that Prime-linked Echo devices were being auto-upgraded without a prompt or an opt-in, so owners had no w

Berker is gone. Not gone as in bankrupt, gone as in folded. At Light + Building in Frankfurt back in March, Hager announced that its switch and socket business is moving out from under the Berker name and into a single Hager-branded range. A hundred years of a name I've written on more spec sheets than I can count, retired in one press release. Normally a rebrand is nothing to write about. This one is, because of what Hager built into the replacement. What's actually changing

Home Assistant's open-source voice assistant now rivals Alexa and Google Home, running fully locally with no cloud dependency. Here's what changed, and why it fits a KNX build.

I'm going to say something that might annoy a few people in this industry: most "smart" homes built in the last decade aren't actually smart. They're automated. And there's a real difference, one that's becoming impossible to ignore right now. For most of the industry's history, "smart home" meant one of two things. You set up a schedule, or you gave a command. Lights off at 11pm because you programmed that. Aircon starts at 4pm because you told it to. Gate opens when you pre

Every few months a client sends me the same message. They have read that Matter is the one standard that finally makes smart homes simple, that it works across Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, and that it might mean they never need an integrator again. Then they ask the honest question underneath it: do I still need KNX? My answer has not changed, but the reasons have gotten sharper this year. Matter has grown up a lot. It is genuinely useful now, and I fit it into projects

Apple's long-rumoured smart home hub, the device people have taken to calling the HomePad, has been pushed back again. The new target is September 2026, and multiple reports this year point to the same reason: the next generation of Siri that's meant to run the thing still isn't ready. The hardware side is apparently done. It's a square display, iPad-like, sitting on a HomePod mini style base or mounted to a wall, built to recognise who's walked into the room and show them th

Most clients never ask about the software. That's fair. You hired someone to handle it. But the tool at the center of every KNX installation just received a significant update, and a few of the changes are worth understanding because they affect how your project gets built and what happens after handover. ETS6.4 was released in March 2026. If you've had a KNX installation done in the past few years, this is the software that was used to program it. Every device on your bus (s

Apple is about to make a serious move in the smart home space. Ahead of WWDC 2026, credible leaks point to a HomeKit hub with a display, an Apple camera, and a Face ID doorbell. If your home runs on KNX, you're already positioned to connect — no rip-and-replace required.

KNX IoT brings IPv6 and Thread connectivity to the standard that’s been running smart buildings for 35 years. Here’s a plain-language breakdown of what it adds, what it doesn’t replace, and why it matters if you’re building now.