I have been seeing some news about Wink is in trouble and could possibly stop working.
With about 90% of my devices on the wink hub I’m a little concerned if they will continue to work. What would you guys suggest is an alternative to integrate my devices? Maybe smartthings or will local control still work with the Wink hub?
The writing has been on the wall for a while now, so I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.
The docs for Wink say: IoT class: Cloud Polling - local control… not so much.
SmartThings is Cloud Push - though maybe the old local MQTT method still works.
Instead, I’d look at how you can integrate the devices more directly. There’s a range of Zigbee choices (zha, deCONZ, and Zigbee2MQTT), at least two ways of integrating Z-Wave (direct and Zwave2MQTT), and even local Lutron control. With those, you’re no longer reliant on the cloud, and your Internet connection.
I moved all my devices to a Nortek HUSBZB-1. I have been extremely pleased. The response time with HA is great. Slight learning curve at first but now super easy and I’m glad I made the switch.
I had the same concerns during this past year so have just this month finally migrated everything from Wink to separate Zigbee and Z-wave sticks (I used Conbee and Zooz). I now have full local control. The migration took place with all 3 hubs running simultaneously. The only item I had that I could not migrate off of Wink was my Emerson Sensi thermostat.
It was NOT painless, but I learned a lot in the process and local control feels really good.
I do have a Aeotec’s Z-Stick Gen5 stick that I’m using for a few lights. The only thing is that it’s plugged into my server in the basement which causes problems when I tried pairing my locks since its not very close to them. Maybe I will try to get it closer to them with a USB ext cable.
My server is also in the basement and I a had a 10ft usb ext cable so I just brought the stick to a more centralized location with that but it might have been unnecessary because I have had no distance issues even with my detached garage. (Although I brought my gocontrol garage door opener in for pairing, that was an issue even with the wink hub, it had to be feet away initially)