[tout]

I worked on a BLE mesh-based smarthome product.

Bluetooth, as a whole, gets complicated quickly.

It was a bit of a pain to work with, but I think it was more the SDK/implementation than the spec itself. Iirc this company had created its own "mesh" before the official Bluetooth spec so working backwards to conform to the official spec was rough.

There were a few annoying limitations around max hops and leader election that were tricky. This mesh needed to have a single "gateway" node to go between the mesh and a normal BLE connection to the phone.

I still think BLE mesh is a better solution than ZigBee/Z-Wave.

I don't know if there's been good progress on client SDKs to have an easier time interacting with BLE. Getting bluez to do what I wanted was not simple, and a lot of the time it wasn't compatible with hardware.