[robotmay]

I've had a lot of success with z-wave devices in my home, hooked into Home Assistant. They seem more resilient than zigbee (and much more reliable than any of the bespoke wifi stuff) and are largely all interoperable. I've got a bunch of z-wave devices like plugs and thermostats, but it comes at a high cost.

For lights I do use zigbee ones just because they're cheaper, but my Hue and IKEA mix do have communication issues sometimes (I have them both on a Deconz stick attached to my server).

But all of this relies on Home Assistant. I honestly can't imagine trying to use smart home devices as a "normal" consumer, relying on the software of specific companies. They're all largely terrible walled gardens, and I'm constantly surprised by how bad they actually are.

[icoder]

Comparable here, using mostly Zigbee (Hue, IKEA, Xiaomi and others) with Deconz RaspBee, which works great, although I do see communication issues from time to time. I have Zigbee lights and door/temp/motion sensors. I added Shelly modules behind my 'normal looking' wall switches on a local MQTT. This all comes together in a local NodeRED (on a Pi that also contains the RaspBee and runs the Deconz software and MQTT server). I use a few plugins heavily for input / output (MQTT, Deconz, etc), but I've got quite a few (reusable) function nodes as well with my own code.

Like you said, I can't see a 'normal' consumer do something comparable, locally without a technical background. It's all too fragmented, closed, clouded.