So to give some background. My wife, son and I live in a 7 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 2 kitchen, etc. house. Yes, that’s overkill for 3 people. It made more sense when we moved in. My parents were coming to live with us, my mother-in-law was going to be staying over the winters, and my grandmother was going to be visiting regularly. This meant my sister and brother-in law would probably also be coming to We hadn’t begun the process of adopting a child yet.
15 years later, my parents, grandmother and mother-in-law are all in heaven, and we completed an adoption ( which took 6 years ) of a special needs child from Kyrgyzstan. As part of adopting our son, it became obvious to us that some home automation would be helpful in managing and monitoring stuff around the house to keep us all safe and aware of what was going on. 
After looking at solutions, I decided on a Wink Hub 1, mostly because it was really the only solution that I could find that allowed me to choose between different manufacturers for sensors and other end devices. It didn’t hurt that at the time The Home Depot debuting it, at < $100, and you also got two GE Zigbee LED connected light bulbs ( I think you hit a refund or some such as part of the deal ). I also bought a controllable Levinton Smart Plug-in Outlet ( at the time it was the least expensive extra
add in, and later I realized it was a very smart idea.) On-boarding the devices well well, called customer support for some questions about the lock, and found out that Wink had GREAT customer support (at least at the time) and the support folks would stay on the phone for as long as you'd need.
The Wink hub wasn’t a perfect product,but it looked like a vibrant environment, with the Quirky Labs (which I think was the birthplace of the Hub -- after the Pivot controllable power strip) which was a “Professional Maker-like” product development business feeding in new sensors, and other controllable products, it looked it had the perfect components to take off in the retail/residential home automation space. They didn't have a recurring cost (which others had) so that was a huge attraction (and it wasn't just a DIY solution -- I'm a long time software architect/developer and while I can code plugins easily enough, some things I just want to work... since I have PLENTY of other technology projects to work on...)
And they had this logo (see at the top of this post) that you could find on boxes, sometimes even before the items showed up on their website as products that were supported. (and it's still on some items that they no-longer list on their website as well... another story to come..) The logo really helped find products and it made it "fun" to go to The Home Depot and Lowes to look for what new gadget was available.
Now, moving forward in time, I've expanded the amount of "smarts" that my house has. I've got:
- 8 GE Z-wave Toggle light switches (and 1 add on GE Toggle light switch)
- 2 GE Z-wave in-wall outlets
- 3 total Schlage Z-wave locks
- a Quirky Overflow Water sensor
- 2 Leaksmart Water sensors
- 2 Dome Water sensors
- 12 Quirky Tripper sensors
- 2 Wink Relays,
- the "hard-to-find" Hunter Ceiling Fan Control
- a Ring Doorbell
- 6 AC Nest Protects and 1 DC Nest Protect (now replaced with 7 AC First Alert Safe and Sound units)
- a Kidde Smoke/CO detector
- MyQ Garage door Opener (with the MyQ Home bridge)
- 5 Arlo cameras
- 3 Nest Thermostats
- a Z-wave motion detector (generic)
- a Dropcam
- 2 iHome Smart Plugs
- a GE Zigbee smart plug-in outlet
- 2 Zwave Door sensors (were orignally branded Leviton I think, but generic overall)
- 1 Hue Smart Bulb (mult-color)
- 2 total GE Link Light bulbs
Things were moving along fine (though slow... Wink had broken integrations with Ring and Nest and hadn't announced anything significant in a year or so) We were all working from home... sheltering in place..
Then I got an e-mail from Wink. Surprise!! Users had from May 6th to May 13th to either sign up for a $5 a month subscription or all their devices would be basically useless. (they've since extended the time window until May 20th).
My main complaint about this (aside from the fact they had always advertised as "NO FEES") was that they provided no-roadmap nor list of product enhancements... so no fix for the broken Ring integration (2FA breaks Ring in Wink) no fix for Nest Integration (no new products can be added, and if you change the e-mail account, you lose what's already been connected) nor fixes for things like the Wink Relay.
Of course, when I actually tried to post something to their support portal, that was down...and couldn't call support since phone support had been down for a few months at least...
After this e-mail (but during this 2 week window) MyQ also announced that as of June 1st that integration will be discontinued.
All told, I took these as signs that Wink was committing Business Suicide... and from the feedback I saw around the internet, it seems other users had similar feelings.
So I had to decide what to do.
Since I'm a Mac user (though not exclusively, I use mostly Unix/Linux boxes and of course also have Windows machines...) I decided to try to move to Homekit as the "With-Wink-Everything-Works-in-One-App" replacement. Others may decide to move to other options (i.e. Home Assistant only, or SmartThings, or Homebridge, etc.) However, this is my story.
(But I will say it was mainly because I wanted at least to have some "commercial support" for the platform and one that I felt had good security. That ruled out Google and Amazon, since I'm just not happy with their data protection policies... I have some devices (necessary evil) but didn't want everything to be on either of those platforms.)
So the subject of this blog will be how I migrated off Wink after their surprise e-mail.
How I enhanced things,
made things better,
and didn't look back.
Thus began my "Life After Wink....."
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