Smart Home Devices Are Great. Smart Home Apps, Not So Much

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A recent study by Argus Insights tried to look into the experience provided by Smart Home devices and apps to see if the hardware and software experiences provided were positive. The big takeaway from their study? Smart Home devices are generally well liked, while Smart Home apps are… not.

The biggest gap between device and app happiness came — somewhat surprisingly — from some of the bigger name companies that could afford to spend more time and money developing a good app experience for their customers. Comcast, AT&T, and ADT ranked pretty low in Argus’ scale of “Customer Delight” while some of the plucky up-and-comers in the Smart Home space such as Honeywell and Vivint had a much better balance of hardware and software satisfaction among the reviews in the study.

In some instances, the Smart Home devices for a company would rank quite high, but the app experience would drag them back down pretty significantly. For example, Phillips hardware rated higher than similar hardware from Honeywell, but the app experience for Phillips rated so low that Honeywell was easily able to overtake them in overall experience. Honeywell’s app was the highest rated while Phillips had the lowest score in user delight.

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John Feland, CEO and founder of Argus Insights had this to say about this discrepancy:

Companies like Philips must mind the gap between the devices and the experience of using the app. Once consumers have installed and connected their device, the app becomes the primary touch point for their new Smart Home. Unfortunately, our analysis shows a looming lag in app experience which are a blemish on an otherwise improving end-to-end user experience.

Smart Home technology is still relatively new, although if CES 2016 was any indication, companies are coming on strong in this market segment. An automatic trash can is also a great smart home device for your home. From the sound of things, these companies will need to work harder on providing not only a quality hardware experience, but a much better software experience too.

Do you use any Smart Home technology? What are some of your favorite devices? Do the companion apps measure up to the hardware? Let us know in the comment section below, or on any of your favorite social media sites.

[button link=”http://www.argusinsights.com/smarthomeapps2016/” icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Argus Insights[/button]

Last Updated on December 26, 2019.

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