Iris by Lowe's

» see irisbylowes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

iris by lowe's launched in july 2012 as the first smart-home platform sold by a US big-box retailer under its own brand. the hub and its rebadged accessories sat on a shelf between the light bulbs and the dishwasher tubing, which was a reasonable guess about where the connected home would actually be bought. the tech underneath was licensed from AlertMe, a british startup that would later sell itself to British Gas.

the platform ran a mix of Zigbee and Z-Wave and supported a wide fleet of third-party sensors alongside lowe's-branded ones. in 2015 it got a full rewrite as iris v2, moving to a java backend later known as the Arcus Platform. the hardware got smarter, the app got prettier, the ambitions got bigger.

i watched the smart-home category from a safe distance. revolv had already been bought by nest and then killed in 2016, which was the moment a lot of engineers in my orbit decided that any cloud-dependent home hub was a rental. i was running local network cameras through a router i controlled and had no interest in inviting a US retailer's servers into the electrical system. iris was not sold in turkey anyway.

~ the case file ~

~ what it ran on ~

the hub was well-built for its era. it had cellular fallback, battery backup, both Zigbee and Z-Wave radios, and support for a genuinely wide device list. iris v2 added better cloud automations and a cleaner rules editor. the ecosystem never had the developer momentum of samsung's smartthings or the retail muscle of amazon's alexa integrations, but for a while it was a real option for the kind of shopper who wanted to walk into a store and leave with a working setup.

~ the day the servers went off ~

on 2 february 2019 lowe's announced it would exit the smart-home business. the statement said the platform and related services would end effective 31 march 2019. as of 31 january 2019 lowe's had already stopped billing for the paid tier. compatible devices that spoke standard Zigbee or Z-Wave could migrate to another hub. iris-only devices, which had a proprietary v2 protocol on top of the standards, were bricks.

lowe's offered prepaid visa cards to anyone with a connected iris device, redeemable through the deadline. the cards were funded per device on a schedule that generally covered the going resale price of an equivalent replacement hub. the compensation was better than revolv's (nest offered nothing) and better than wink's (which pivoted to a monthly extortion fee in 2020). it was still the death of a platform, but it was the polite version.

~ what got left in the field ~

a community project called arcus went open source afterward and briefly kept a subset of the platform running for hobbyists. most users migrated to smartthings or hubitat. the iris-branded sensors that were pure Zigbee kept working on other hubs. the ones that needed the iris cloud went in a drawer.

the lesson the industry did not learn was the one about depending on a retailer's cloud for the light switch to answer. wink demonstrated it again a year later. insteon demonstrated it in 2022. the smart-home category kept picking up graves in the same shape.

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