They are giving one weeks notice and bricking your devices after that. This was the nail in the coffin. Glad I had already bought Smartthings so I have a platform to move my zwave products too. Who else is abandoning ship??
My question is, with Wink local support will it still work with Home Assistant or will they somehow disable even the current setup? Thoughts?
The local control portion of Wink still requires cloud access to get the initial token. It also only works for lights/locks/switches.
If you were gonna move from wink to smartthings, why not get a Z-wave stick instead for full local control?
It’s just I already have a Smartthings hub that I bought awhile ago when I was having problems with Wink.
Yeah it’s probably time for me to mosey on from Wink too. I’ll need to get a Lutron bridge because I have a lot of Lutron switches (no common wires in my switch boxes), but what is the best option for Zigbee and Z-Wave? I originally went with Wink because I wanted one hub that was easy to use and would support basically every radio type… so whatever Zigbee and Z-Wave devices are easiest to use and have the widest compatibility would be nice.
There’s a Zigbee/Z-wave combo USB stick that’s an option if you’re in the US (HUSBZB-1). Apart from that there are several choices for individual Zigbee and Z-wave sticks.
Not sure about Smartthings, but at least with Wink it was night and day between response time using a local Z-wave/Zigbee stick verses cloud option of Wink. I’ll never go back to any cloud solution!
So wait, “local control” is also going to be broken in a couple of days? I could care less about the Wink app most of the time as I use my HA interface to control lights. I will miss the Google assistant link, though as that’s how we mostly interacted with the Wink lights. Guess I’ll by a 4-pack of bulbs from Wyze for now… No way I’m paying Wink for a sub.
Correct, local control will most likely break.
I am not sure how they are going to implement this “blocking” but local control will not function without getting a token from the Wink API.
Pay more get less as Wink terminates its partnership with Chamberlain for its MyQ integration:
I think we are seeing the end of Wink as customers are dropping and now integrations. This is just the beginning. I guess without the subscription model they were going under anyways. It’s just a matter of time.
It’s a problem with the business model and entire concept altogether:
In order to make their system work, they need cloud servers. To maintain cloud servers, they need money. The cloud server really does nothing you can’t do locally so they are basically charging customers to maintain something nobody really needs. The cloud is completely idiotic for home automation. It is a reliability, performance, security and now cost liability for near zero added value and this is also what I foresee for SmartThings… If you want to talk green, we are spending so much power transmitting these packets back and forth to server farms to do the same thing we can do faster and with less power locally. It just makes no sense… The same can be said of IFTTT…
Go for hubitat instead if you like ST.
I do agree with you. It’s a good lesson that all home automation devices should be local first. I think we will eventually see a death of hubs. The industry is still a mess.
Could you recommend the best wink hub replacement? If USB zwave/ZigBee combo, is there a “best choice”? Also would it still work given my HASS is running as a guest on a hyperV server?
Lastly, does anyone know if there are plans to resurrect the idea of rooting the wink hub and making an open source OS? Sure would be nice to continue having just 1 hub that does it all…
I went from Wink to HUSBZB-1 nearly a year ago and have been very pleased… little learning curve at first to get setup but now it’s great, no complaints here… much faster than wink also.
Yup I second the HUSBZB-1, I’m a former Wink user and jumped ship last fall with Wink and switch over to the HUSBZB with no problems other then the PITA of un-pairing devices from Wink and repairing to HUSBZB.
I use the USB stick with a VM and my Hypervisor is QEMU-KVM running on Linux, very easy to pass USB devices through to the VM.
As for Wink I saw that they gave up on the subscription model (for now), probably no one signed up or not enough people signed up to cover the cost of the subscription services itself…what a cluster WInk has become!
I don’t think there is any way to root the Wink hub 2 and probably can’t as I’m guessing someone would have by now. It’s possible that they provide opensource if they (or when they) go into chapter 6 bankruptcy, but I wouldn’t count on that.
My local access to Wink isn’t working for the last day or so, but I am not sure why.
It may be the push for me to move the last few things to HA. I’ve got a spare Relay rooted and running as a HA client to switch one of the Relays over so I can root the other and switch it. Then I need to move the Lurton Connected Remotes over and I can drop Wink.
I suspect Wink was able to push out the subscription start because they had enough people sign up to convince someone to loan them money so they could stay afloat. They really should have started a subscription service model a couple years ago since their business model was unsustainable and at that point they could have offered a free service, a $1/month standard service and a $5/month high end service. Now it is a little too late.
I too am going to move on from Wink. Because I have a lot of Lutron Caseta dimmer switches (which were expensive), I need another way to integrate those into Home Assistant. Can anyone suggest the available approaches I can take? Based on my research, I see the following two:
In short, any suggestions on how I should move from Wink completely to HA yet still use my Lutron Caseta dimmers with Home Assistant? I don’t think I can go directly from Lutron Caseta dimmers to HA given an apparent proprietary protocol, right?
If you want to keep using Lutron, the Lutron bridge would be a must - neither SmartThings nor Hubitat has the radio to control Lutron devices / clients directly.
And I also read if you want to control Lutron locally, you will need the Pro bridge. The cheaper Lutron “standard” bridge requires internet to work.
k8gg,
Thanks for the information. I was hoping I could go with Hubitat, but I’ll proceed with the Pro bridge, thanks again for the clarification.