You can mimic one with a lot of work via HomeAssistant and some programming; the secret is you can create virtual switches that you can then use Siri to turn on or off to trigger activities.
As I've pointed out before, home IoT ought to include duct damper controls, vents and fans to the outside, and sensors which measure temperature, humidity, CO2, and maybe other pollutants, both inside and outside the house. Then they can use outside air when appropriate. You can buy all that. It's common in commercial building control. Honeywell and Johnson Controls, old-line building control vendors, sell this stuff. It requires some engineering for each building. That's why it's rarely seen in homes.
Some years ago I went to an IoT meeting in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco. The meeting was in a big room on the waterfront, in a refurbished industrial space. The room had skylights with glass vents that could be opened and windows onto the Bay that could be opened. Both were controlled by a manual endless chain, which could have been motorized without too much trouble. There were ceiling fans, and a standard dumb HVAC system. None of this stuff was interconnected. With a big group in there, it should have sensed rising CO2, opened some of the windows, cranked up the fans, and run the room without active HVAC until sunset. Then it should have gradually closed the windows as the room cooled, kept the ceiling fans turning over, and added some heat. Once everyone left, it should have briefly ventilated the room thoroughly, then closed up everything, stopped the fans, and let the room cool down to 60F or so while unoccupied. But no.
That's building automation.
Hotels go for this stuff, because they have big energy costs and a huge range of occupancy, especially in function rooms.
True automation has to be designed in, and it costs money.
Then there's the likes of Ikea, also with their own line of smart home devices doing just fine as well.
For example, the master bedroom should have four-way light switches [1] such that the lights in the room can be turned off by the switch next to the door, the switch next to the bathroom, and a switch on either side of the bed.
Even a "home theater setup" switch can be created by some intelligent lighting choices (turn off main lights but turn on "audience lights" which triggers the screen to drop down, projector to come on, etc).
[1] Once at 4-way, you can go to N-way by chaining as many as you want: https://matthews.sites.wfu.edu/courses/p230/switches/Switche...
I think the best switch of all is going to be to anticipate the user’s needs and adjust the house to them. It’ll likely be in a range of subtlety between closing the blinds for you when you’re about to walk through your living room naked and giving you a light show if you put dance music on. The reason you probably won’t ever see it is because not everyone wants the same things and it’s difficult to intuit what anyone wants without being told. You have to solve some pretty big social problems with technology to make it seamless for normal people.
The most sensible approach might be to somehow clone your consciousness into a machine and let the machine control your house. This would probably make a great Black Mirror episode.
Perhaps you might be viewing smart homes in too narrow of a view to recognize how wide spread it is.
[1] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-s...
Again, the question comes down to whether or not the residents are the market.
> People expect more from their homes
That sounds like housing industry hype. People want an affordable, safe, secure home. They don't necessarily want or even need to check the status of their HVAC over the internet while on vacation in Maui.
You can look up plenty of statistics regarding smart homes, and every one of them shows growth, and increase of demand. Especially considering smart homes cost more, this isn't a limitation, as most smart home packages are an additional cost to their rent/purchase. Going back to Mattamy, this is an additional monthly subscription.
Again, I don't understand your attempt to downplay this. It seems narrative driven rather than objective. You want to believe something is true, so you come up with ideas like landlords being enough of a big market to double smart home industry in 3 years.
I deal with a lot of small to large farm | market garden | light business queries and many people are interested in fully digitally metred water (scheme + bore) | power | gas usage with fine control on reticulation, powered machines, furnaces, etc.
There's less interest in voice controlled automation and far more in fully logged + spreadsheeted resource usage and scheduled operation patterns.
There's keen interest in early notification of failures, leaks, spikes, etc.
This overlaps "home" in the sense that many of these queries are coming from people that live where they want these systems.