Wink Hub

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

~ the obit ~

i never bought a wink hub. cloud-dependent home automation stayed out of my house because i had watched revolv get killed by nest with a firmware nag in may 2016, and after that the whole category read as leaseware. wink is the second story in the same shape. it did not vanish the way insteon did in 2022. it did something worse, which is that it stayed alive just enough to hold its existing customer base hostage.

wink shipped on 23 june 2014 as a spin-off from quirky's inventor incubator with ge as a hardware partner. the pitch was the same as smartthings and wemo at the time: one hub in your closet talking z-wave and zigbee to third-party bulbs and switches, with a single app in front of it. quirky raised about $20 million for wink and pushed it hard through home depot channels. that lasted a year and a half. quirky filed bankruptcy in september 2015 and flex bought the wink piece out of the estate that november for $15 million.

flex ran wink for less than two years. it sold the whole thing to i.am+, will.i.am's black eyed peas frontman holding company, on 27 july 2017 for a reported $59 million. that price never made sense on the fundamentals and it did not get better. by early 2020 the operating cash was gone and the only lever left was the users. anyway, on 6 may 2020 the company sent an email announcing a $4.99 monthly subscription starting 13 may 2020. seven days to pay or your hub stops responding to the app.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

the six-year run under three owners is the deeper obit here. quirky had been overspending on inventor-crowdsourced products long before wink, and the whole holding fell into chapter 11 in september 2015. flex bought wink because it made hardware for wink already and did not want the platform to disappear on its supplier base. i.am+ bought it because will.i.am was chasing a smart-home story to attach to his ipod-earbud brand. really though, none of the three owners had a business model that made wink profitable on its own, and none of them ever charged users anything until 2020.

customers noticed the neglect. app updates slowed. the alexa integration broke and stayed broken for weeks at a time. the developer api that a small third-party ecosystem had built on top of went dormant. the reddit and community forums filled up with departure threads all through 2019, mostly people moving to hubitat or home assistant. by then, wink was quietly shrinking on the actively-used side even though the total install base was still 1.3 million or so.

~ the actual end ~

the 6 may 2020 email hit inboxes in the morning us pacific and had the entire hardware press covering the story by afternoon. consumer reports called it "borderline extortion" in a piece the next week. 9to5mac ran a "why you should not pay this ransom" walkthrough. the register did the same in a sharper british tone. for whatever reason wink extended the deadline by two months after the backlash, but the extension did not change the mandatory-subscription trajectory. by july 2020 the paywall was live and anyone who did not opt in lost app control of hardware they had bought outright.

the migration paths were already there. hubitat had been shipping a local-first z-wave hub for two years at that point, and home assistant had matured enough to run on a raspberry pi in most closets. samsung smartthings was still cloud-first but felt like a bigger safer parent to trust. anyway, the community wiki collected step-by-step guides for pulling z-wave devices off wink and re-pairing them with new controllers, and by the end of 2020 most of the sophisticated users had moved.

~ the long tail ~

wink is technically still online in 2026 under i.am+ ownership at a subscription tier. it has not shipped a new hub in years and the third-party device compatibility list has not grown since the pandemic. it is one of those services that stopped mattering culturally on a specific date even though the domain still resolves. the may 2020 subscription mandate is the moment the smart-home cloud-brick pattern (revolv had gone dark in 2016, insteon would follow in 2022) locked in a full generation of skepticism toward vendor-hosted home automation.

matter and thread as protocols exist specifically because wink and its peers happened. the modern push to keep the orchestration on a local hub with cloud as an optional extension is a direct architectural response to the events wink helped seed. i.am+ probably did not intend to be a case study in what not to do, but that is what it ended up being.

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