Wink, the once-innovative smart home platform, has been unavailable for two weeks with no sign of recovery. Customers of the Will-i-am-owned company, who pay $5 per month for the service to run their connected lights, locks, sensors, and other devices through the Wink Hub, have been completely stranded. It’s so bad that Wink’s website and email are affected, which screams “someone didn’t pay the bill this month.”
There was no official word from Wink at first, but an email to users posted on Reddit 10 days after the outage began arriving. “Beginning on July 1st, our systems have regrettably become temporarily unavailable. We assure you that we are working hard to find a solution to the ongoing problem. We regret that we cannot provide an ETA at this time.”
The email goes on to say that the company expects to “be fully online soon” and will post updates at status.winkapp.com. Customers have found it difficult to cancel the service they can’t use because Wink’s main website Wink.com and its email domains are down.
As of today, Wink email support is back up and running, according to a status page, and the company’s Twitter account directs users to email [email protected]. The website wink.com is also operational, but it only displays a static message stating that the company is aware of “an issue impacting the platform.”
Wink appears to be the victim of too little, too soon. A good product that entered the market early but then failed to innovate as the space grew. Quirky, its parent company, declared bankruptcy in 2015 and sold Wink to Flextronics. The wheels came off two years later when it was sold to i.am+, Black Eyed Peas founder Will.i.am’s technology company.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all replacement for the Wink Hub’s extensive radio support, but there are plenty of viable options if you’re willing to tinker with a few devices. Hubitat and the Aeotec Hub, which functions as a SmartThings hub, are both good options for people who want to use both Zigbee and Z-Wave devices, as is Home Assistant. If you purchase a smart hub Echo device, Amazon Alexa will support some Zigbee devices.
When the smart home connectivity standard Matter becomes available, device connectivity should become less of a source of frustration for users. However, with little backward compatibility announced for many products thus far, Matter may not be the complete solution that those with a lot of existing home automation gear are looking for.
