The biggest smart home fails of 2025, ranked

10. Alexa+ and Google Gemini get off to slow starts 

2025 was supposed to be the year when AI for the smart home arrived with a bang. Instead, it was the year when AI tip-toed into the smart home market, ever so slowly and oh-so careful to avoid slip-ups. 

Amazon was first out of the gates, unveiling Alexa+ (for the second time) in February, while Google waited until October before revealing the details of its Gemini for Home effort. The rollouts have been conspicuously cautious; it took months before early access to Alexa+ became widely available, while Google only recently stepped up the pace of its Gemini for Home invites. 

Both Amazon and Google have ambitious plans for their respective generative AI smart home helpers, and if you ask them, they’ll say Alexa+ and Gemini are already in millions of homes, packed with features that take smart home monitoring and automation to the next level, yada yada. 

The truth is that smart home users have greeted Alexa+ and Gemini at Home with ambivalence, with a few marveling at the AI-powered changes in their assistants while others have grumbled about missing features (“Continued Conversation,” anyone?) or head-scratching answers to smart home queries.  

Many of Amazon’s and Google’s most exciting AI smart home promises have yet to materialize; Alexa+’s agentic shopping abilities are still mainly confined to Amazon.com, for example, while the upcoming Google Home Speaker with Gemini Live capabilities won’t arrive until next spring. And there have been plenty of bumps along the way; getting Alexa+ to buy a movie ticket or score a dinner reservation is a hit-or-miss proposition, while Gemini security-cam video descriptions are prone to occasional hallucinations. 

Am I saying that Alexa+ and Gemini at Home are total failures? No—like other recent smart home innovations that have suffered from rocky rollouts (I’m looking at you, Matter), it’s still early days, and I expect the pace of new features to accelerate in the coming year. 

But did Alexa+ and Gemini at Home revolutionize the smart home in 2025? Not really, no. 

9. Nuki Smart Lock put Wi-Fi behind a paywall 

We’re all too used to smart devices that put their best features behind paywalls. Take security cameras, which regularly require paid subscription plans for AI-enabled object detection, cloud video storage, and other advanced functionality. Heck, some of the best security cams are barely usable unless you fork over $10 a month or more. 

But we’re not used to subscription charges for smart locks, particularly when it comes to something as basic as Wi-Fi access. So we were taken aback when Nuki tried to slide Wi-Fi functionality for its Nuki Smart Lock behind a paywall. Unless you coughed up $5.90 a month for Nuki Premium, you’d only be able to control Nuki’s smrat lock locally via Bluetooth, while remote access would require purchasing a smart hub with a Thread border router. 

It was a weird—and expensive—restriction for an otherwise solid retrofit smart lock. Nuki eventually relented, dropping the fee for Nuki Premium altogether earlier this month. But the company did impose a $40 price hike on the smart lock, raising its price to $199 from $159. 

8. iRobot declares bankruptcy 

It’s hard to believe that robot vacuum pioneer iRobot has been brought so low, but here we are, with the company filing for bankruptcy protection as it prepares to sell itself to its primary component supplier.  

The writing has been on the wall for iRobot ever since Amazon’s plans to acquire the brand collapsed. Struggling amid fierce competition from such overseas robot vacuum competitors as Roborock, Eufy, and Dreame, iRobot began falling behind, playing catch-up with its latest Roombas rather than leading the way with new features and functionality. Then came the grim quarterly earnings reports, with the company warning of steadily mounting debt amid the crushing weight of U.S.-imposed tariffs.  

iRobot says its will remain in operation during its bankruptcy proceedings, and that its Roombas will continue to work normally. But with the dark clouds hovering over iRobot, it seems likely that smart home users will be even less likely to choose a Roomba for their next robot vacuum. 

7. Google dumbs down two older Nest thermostats 

The Nest Thermostat was one of the original smart home devices, which made it all the more surprising—and sad—when Google pulled the plug on two of its oldest models this year. 

Google lowered the boom back in April, warning users of the first- and second-generation Nest Thermostats—released in 2011 and 2014 respectively—that the devices would stop getting software updates by October and would also lose Nest and Google Home app support. Google Assistant access would go out with the bathwater, too. 

When the fateful day came in October, the two oldest Nest Thermstat models dropped offline. They can still be operated manually and any existing schedules will continue to operate, but the very thing that made the devices special—their smarts—is no more. 

6. Logitech drops support for older Harmony remotes 

It’s been roughly four years since Logitech called it quits on its Harmony line of universal remotes, which are still prized by home theater enthusiasts for their ability to control a dizzying number of A/V components as well as smart home devices. 

At the time, Logitech promised to keep its Harmony servers running for “as long as customers are using [them],” but then the word came down earlier this year: Logitech was cutting support for more than two-dozen of its first-generation Harmony remotes. 

As with what happened with the older Nest Thermostats, the affected Harmony remotes still function on a basic level, but they can no longer be programmed or customized to work with new devices. In other words, the smart remotes turned dumb in an instant. 

Newer Harmony remotes such as the Harmony One, the Elite, and the Companion are still up and running, but owners of those newer devices (I use the Harmony Companion practically every day) are surely wondering if their days are numbered. 

5. Kohler’s toilet cam sparks privacy debate 

Kohler Health had a good idea when it came up with the Dekoda, a smart camera that clips to your toilet. The $599 cam (which also requires a monthly subscription fee) checks your gut health—a key indicator of your overall physical condition—by scanning the fecal matter that’s floating in your toilet bowl following a bowel movement.  

Naturally, prospective buyers were curious about privacy, given that the Dekoda (which is designed so it aims only down at your poop, not up toward your backside) is taking some fairly sensitive snapshots. Don’t worry, Kohler said: the camera’s data connection to the company’s servers is encrypted—and in fact, it’s end-to-end encrypted, making your scans ever safer. 

Before long, however, a privacy researcher noted that “end-to-end encryption” is commonly understood to mean an encrypted pipeline that even the service provider can’t crack; Ring, for example, can’t see or perform AI object detection on your security cam video events if you have E2EE enabled. But Kohler Health does, in fact, have access to your data; so strictly speaking, the encrypted connection isn’t end-to-end encryption, a researcher argued. Kohler fired back that the connection is end-to-end encrypted, because Kohler is the party at the other “end” of the secure connection. 

While the tit-for-tat may sound pedantic, it underlines the confusion surrounding who sees what when it comes to your private smart home data.  

4. The viral ‘May 28 camera hack’ that (apparently) wasn’t 

Ring camera users who diligently check their accounts noticed something odd this past summer: a rash of alerts notifying them that a bunch of either unknown or unexpected devices had been granted access to their accounts. What was really weird about the alerts was that they all hit on the same day: May 28. 

The flurry of alerts went mostly unnoticed until a couple of months later, when the warnings about the mysterious notifications went viral on TikTok. For a few weeks in July, the “May 28 camera hack” videos were everywhere, with an ever-growing number of TikTok users urging their followers to check their Ring apps for the suspicious activity. 

Ring finally addressed the odd alerts on a support page, stating that the spate of notifications was “the result of a backend update” and that “we have no reason to believe this is the result of unauthorized access to customer accounts.” 

3. Tablo DVRs go dark 

It was a long, annoying summer for Tablo users, who had to endure a series of outages that rendered their over-the-air DVRs unable to play their recorded TV shows—or live TV channels at all, for that matter—while also playing havoc with their electronic programming guides. It was yet another case of a smart device turned dumb due to a cloud failure. 

The good news was that Nuvyyo, the manufacturer of the Tablo, finally made good on a promise to roll out an offline mode for the DVR, which can now play TV recordings to surf channels even when the internet goes out. The Tablo really should have shipped with that feature in the first place, but hey—better late than never. 

2. Amazon cloud outage takes Ring and Blink cameras offline 

Whenever Amazon Web Services goes down, it takes a decent chunk of the internet down with it—and that includes the cloud services for Ring and Blink, Amazon’s two big security camera brands. (Other popular internet services, from Apple TV and Hulu to Reddit and Roblox, went down, too.)

During the Amazon cloud outage, which began in the wee hours of October 20 and persisted until late in the morning, both Ring and Blink camera and video doorbell users were unable their live feeds or video event libraries, with at least one Blink owner saying that their camera missed an in-progress crime during that downtime. 

Ring and Blink service was fully restored before the day was out, but the outage served as a potent reminder of how cloud-dependent even the best security systems are. 

1. Smart beds lose cloud connectivity, then cook their owners  

We saw plenty of smart home failures in 2025, but none of them captured our attention like the case of the smart beds that began roasting their owners during a server outage—and yes, it was the same Amazon Web Services outage that knocked out Ring and Blink cameras. 

Not only did the “Pod” smart beds from manufacturer Eight Sleep become unresponsive during the outage, they began heating up uncontrollably while also frozen in position. Users reported waking up in the middle of the night due to the overheating beds, while others said they couldn’t go to be at all because their mattresses were stuck in upright or otherwise awkward positions. 

Fortunately, the Eight Sleep story has a happy ending, with the company rolling out an offline mode within days of the incident.