This is important and I’m glad you said it with emphasis. Wink is still a great solution with HA. That being said, I also run an Aeotec Zwave stick and have a separate Zwave network alongside Wink for things that they don’t support.
I plan on staying with that for the foreseeable future as a few days is way to early in the game to see what this new influx of developers and capital may produce.
Very true, and remember, I switched, way before the sale announcement came out. It had nothing to do with my decision.
I remember discussing it with you during the “Great Rebuild” 
and the reasons you gave were sound and still are.
I don’t think Wink is a bad product, but I don’t hold out much hope for the company. Quirky went under owing their primary manufacturing partner Flextronics millions in unpaid bills, so Flex took their only viable product in payment. The trouble there being that Flex is an OEM that makes products for their customers, they don’t sell retail at all, and they don’t want to put themselves into a position where they are competing with their existing customers. As a result they needed to unload Wink ASAP.
I don’t see a track record of success for Mr i.am and I don’t think any of this looks good for the long-term chances of the Wink ecosystem.
Just think if we could root a wink2, and install HA on it. Might be a nice retrofit market…
Wink had an estimate user base of over 1.3 million homes in 2016.
Smartthings in the same time frame had somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 homes. (Samsung keeps this info close to the vest, so it’s hard to know for sure).
The main reason Quirky ran into financial problems was their scattered platform of inventions and the big security push issue that caused the problems in April 2015 that forced the recalls. They handled it well, but it put the company in deep debt.
I still think that there is a lot of speculation here that is based on little evidence beyond guesses. People will always presage the death of a company, but companies like Nintendo, Apple, IBM and even Amazon were all counted out at one time. People forget that Amazon fell from a valuation of $361.88 per share in December 1998 to a low of $5.51 in October 2001. I bought in at $115. Where is it this week? $1020 a share.
Cool, you’re buying steaks fro all of us tonight. Right??
You’re comparing companies to products. Quirky, the company that brought you Wink, has already failed. The next company to own it kept the product for less than a year. Now it’s in the hands of will.i.am, who doesn’t have a strong track record (yet). This isn’t to say that Wink is a bad product, but it also has yet to find an owner that seems credible and capable of moving the platform forward.
Time out guys,
We aren’t bashing Wink. We are simply saying it’s going to be interesting to see how this change in ownership pans out for them.
I have been very careful to say that my decision to move away from wink was made a month or two before this announcement, and to be honest, this announcement would not have swayed me one way or the other. I don’t care who owns the company, I care how the product works in MY environment. My environment is different from everyone else’s and does not mean that wink is not the correct answer for your environment. I used wink for about a year before I made the switch and was very happy with it.
Just to be clear, I respect @luma’s opinion even though I may disagree with it. The points made have all been valid and factual claims. I just personally feel like taking a leap of faith in the first few weeks of new ownership is prudent and not having any news beyond the PR announcement and simple blog post isn’t enough to go on one way or the other.
It could be that it goes the way of his other projects, then again it could be that his other projects involved dumb ideas to begin with and devs that tried to make those dumb ideas work. Wink is an established platform and product that works well and has a some rough edges that can be polished by the right dev team (automations for one thing, device support for things like sensors another). The new ownership may be able to do more with a better established idea.
But it’s so early in the game it’s all just speculation on our parts. That’s why I have to respect @luma’s opinions, even if they weren’t well thought out - which I believe they were - because anything is possible.
(BTW, that’s what I like best about HA forums; people can disagree and still respect each other. Unlike most of the rest of the Internet… LOL)
Well I purchased a GoControl/Linear stick just to try it out and to integrate it with an Aeotec energy monitor (which isnt compatible with Wink)
We’ll see how it goes
Oooo let me know how it goes I have thought about getting one of those.
Has anyone installed the Aeotec energy monitor themselves. Since it goes on the main lines into the house, I’m kind of curious how many people got an electrician to do it vs taking the chance on power you can’t turn off???
I think it really depends on how comfortable you are with those things I know a lof of people who won’t do any electrical work and I know people who see it as no big deal.
As long as I can throw the breaker, I have no problem doing electrical work and depending on what it is, I’ll do some things with the power on. But it’s the idea of that much voltage coming in, that will make one hell of a current through my body if I hit it wrong. LOL
Guess I am lucky, I have a breaker to flip my main power outside. 
Here that’s called a meter and the power company gets really mad when you play with it.
Yeah it is below the meter, I live in a condo and there aren’t any locks on the breaker for each unit. Kinda not a fan because anyone could just flip the power. But it is nice when I get in the breaker box.
I had an electrician/plumber (yeah, lucky find - the guy is really great at both!) come in to install my LeakSmart shutoff valve and since he had to install an outlet by the panel to power it I had him install the Aeotec HEM as well.
I’m still trying to get it to report properly but since I moved to .50 it is working a LOT better. Before that it was initializing when I restarted HA but then would immediately sleep so I couldn’t even change parameters. The only time it would read in values was when I restarted HA again.
That’s all fixed since .50 updated the OZW version.
Awesome! Are you using the newest Aeotec HEM or one of the old models?