Ecosystems
Which smart home ecosystems actually work locally
A documentation-based comparison of Home Assistant, Apple Home, Matter, and proprietary cloud ecosystems through the lens of local control and privacy.
Build a smart home that still works when the cloud does not.
Unhooked explains local control, open standards, and privacy tradeoffs for people who want useful automation without handing daily home behavior to vendor servers.
Local controlCommands and automations should run inside the home where the platform supports it.
Data ownershipPresence, routines, energy use, and device events deserve deliberate boundaries.
Source disciplineWe separate standards documentation from vendor marketing and ecosystem lock-in.
Local control
Smart home without the cloud: how to start with local control
A practical, source-led starting point for building a smart home around local control, internet-outage resilience, and data ownership.
How Unhooked reads smart home claims
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.
01
Start with docs
Official documentation and standards bodies come before affiliate lists and product copy.
02
Trace control
We ask what still works when the internet, account, or vendor API is unavailable.
03
Disclose limits
Articles do not imply hands-on testing unless a future test note says exactly that.
Start with the controller, then choose the devices.
The most private smart home decisions happen before checkout.