Unhooked explains local control, open standards, and privacy tradeoffs for people who want useful automation without handing daily home behavior to vendor servers.
Local control
The controller is where a smart home is won or lost for privacy and resilience. A source-led guide to what to look for before you pick one, and why the platform name alone is not enough.
Standards
A source-led comparison of the four protocols behind most smart home devices, and what each one means for local control, mesh range, and cloud dependence.
Standards
A source-led look at the Thread border router: the device that bridges a low-power Thread mesh to your home network, why a network can have several, and what the per-vendor credential split means for a local-first home.
Ecosystems
A documentation-based comparison of Home Assistant, Apple Home, Matter, and proprietary cloud ecosystems through the lens of local control and privacy.
Local control
A practical, source-led starting point for building a smart home around local control, internet-outage resilience, and data ownership.
A device can have a local radio and still depend on the cloud. We focus on the full path: controller, radio, bridge, account, automation engine, and fallback behavior.
Official documentation and standards bodies come before affiliate lists and product copy.
We ask what still works when the internet, account, or vendor API is unavailable.
Articles do not imply hands-on testing unless a future test note says exactly that.
The most private smart home decisions happen before checkout.