All the smart home news, reviews, and gadgets you need to know about

Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been acquired by OneRobotics, the parent company of SwitchBot. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Nanoleaf CEO Gimmy Chu says the company will remain independent and that he and his cofounder and COO, Christian Yan, will continue to run it. “Nothing is changing operationally,” says Chu, adding that there are plans for product integrations between the two smart home companies.

The sale, which Chu characterized as “more of a merger,” will provide Nanoleaf with significant resources, including a cash infusion that will, among other things, help the company grow its team at its Toronto headquarters. It will also bring access to the manufacturing facilities and supply chain of the Chinese company, which has a market cap of over $2 billion. “This will enable us to make things at a larger scale, with bigger purchasing power to bring down costs for our customers and have tighter control over the supply chain and quality control,” says Chu.

Thermacell has launched Liv 2.0, the next generation of its Wi-Fi-connected smart mosquito protection system. It features new hardware and can cover a larger area, and Thermacell says its formula can now deter no-see-ums. But it’s also more expensive and requires professional installation.

Liv 2.0 uses the same setup as the original Liv — a central hub with a wired repeller system containing its metofluthrin-based repellent — but it features entirely new hardware. Pricing starts at about $1,746 for a system with three repellers, a six-pack of repellent refills, and coverage of up to 900 square feet. That’s twice as much as the original, which started at $699 and covered about 945 square feet.

Since moving to South Carolina’s Lowcountry, I’ve been spellbound by the myriad of beautiful birds that share the coast with us — ospreys raising their babies in towering nests beside the road to my daughter’s school, roseate spoonbills wading in the marsh on my morning walks, eagles circling over my son’s tennis matches, and a constant parade of songbirds through my backyard. The challenge, as every birder knows, lies in catching these moments. And for that, a smart bird feeder is a fabulous tool.

These use a small, motion-activated camera embedded in a feeder to capture photos and video of birds visiting your backyard, which you can watch in an app on your phone. Most offer AI-powered bird identification, presenting the species along with a cute clip. No more standing motionless with binos on your porch, balancing a Sibley Guide; the bird life comes directly to you. It’s basically OnlyFans for twitchers.

Selling the smart home has been hard. Even Amazon has lost money in the space, despite putting hundreds of millions of Echo devices in people’s homes. Google has also reportedly struggled to turn a profit from its substantial investment in Nest. But now Google is seeing dollar signs in the prospect of selling AI-driven subscriptions in the smart home. And it’s not alone.

At Google I/O this week, Google announced it’s expanding its Gemini for Home APIs to allow companies to integrate more of its Gemini-powered smart home features into their own apps. In a blog post, Google’s Ravi Akella, director of product management for the Home Platform, said this will enable “service providers and hardware manufacturers to build monetizable, proactive services that care for users and their homes.”

Welcome! I’m The Verge’s smart home reviewer, and I’m hosting an exclusive subscriber AMA today at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. I test a lot of connected gadgets for my job, but the dominant device in my home — by both number and square footage covered — is the robot vacuum. At any given time, I have a dozen of these bots bouncing around, sweeping and mopping my floors and irritating my cats.

I just published a guide on how to choose the best robot vacuum for your home, and I recently reviewed the Dyson Spot & Scrub, Shark’s Power Detect, and the Matic, which is the most interesting new approach to a robot vacuum I’ve seen in my 7 years of reviewing these machines.

Inviting a robot vacuum-mop into your life is a big decision. An autonomous floor-cleaning machine roaming your home is equal parts glorious and intrusive. But if it does its job well, you may forgive it for eating your rug tassel, running over your Apple Watch, smearing strawberry jam across your carpet, or chattering to you in Chinese at 3AM — all things that have happened to me in my six years of testing these things.

Over that time, I’ve learned that the best robot vacuum-mop is the one most likely to consistently vacuum and mop your floors with the least intervention. And doing that depends far more on your house than on a spec sheet. The first thing I ask someone who wants to buy a robot vacuum is to describe their house. What is your flooring type, how many rugs do you have, what’s the furniture style, are there big room transitions, and how is the home laid out? All these details factor into which robot will work best for you.

Smart energy management just took a step closer to becoming simpler. This week, the organizations behind Matter, the smart-home interoperability standard, and the OpenADR protocol, which sends signals between the grid and the home, announced an agreement to work together. This should make it easier for connected appliances to participate in demand response programs (DR) and, hopefully, save you money.

In demand response programs, a customer agrees to reduce or shift their electrical usage in exchange for utility bill credits or other incentives. The Connectivity Standards Alliance, which runs Matter, and the nonprofit OpenADR Alliance have outlined how the two protocols will work together to automate this process.

Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been unusually quiet recently. While competitors such as Govee and Philips Hue have been pumping out new products and innovative features at an impressive pace, Nanoleaf has launched just a handful of smart lighting products in the last two years. There’s a reason for this lull — the company has been going through a “brand evolution” focused on wellness, robotics, and, of course, AI.

“The smart home is getting kind of boring,” says the ever-candid Gimmy Chu, CEO and cofounder of Nanoleaf, which he now doesn’t want me to call a smart lighting company. “Our brand needs to evolve to incorporate some of the other products that we’re going to be releasing.”

Hundreds of influencers, media folks, and a few C-list celebs (sorry, Woz) filled the cavernous halls of the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts last week. They were assembled for Dreame’s launch event, ostensibly into both America and a much bigger ecosystem of products. Across the four-day showcase, the Chinese robot vacuum company pitched an AI-wrapped future that extends beyond floor cleaning to smartphones, smart rings, smart cars, and more robotic arms than any cat would be comfortable with.

The event, called Dreame Next 2026, leaned heavily on spectacle and vaporware. While there were some actual launches in the vacuuming, air-purifying, personal care, and home appliance categories, the focus was on attention-grabbing concept gadgets. From a fridge with a robotic arm that puts your groceries away and a robot that folds your laundry to a rocket-powered EV, everywhere you looked was an ambitious new product.

Amazon-owned Blink has two new video doorbells: the Blink Wired Doorbell 2K+ for $49.99 and the Blink Battery Doorbell 2K+ for $69.99 if you already have a sync module; or $79.99 bundled with the required hub.

The doorbell cameras join Blink’s 2K camera lineup announced last fall, and also work with Blink’s smart video descriptions, which send alerts with text summaries of events the camera captures, such as “person playing basketball in the driveway.” They’re available for preorder now and will ship on May 20th.

Homebridge, the popular software solution that allows you to integrate non-HomeKit devices like Ring cameras into Apple Home, is adding support for the Matter smart home standard.

Today, May 4th, Homebridge 2.0, which has been in beta for over three years, officially launches. Along with other improvements, the update brings the “initial groundwork for Matter support,” according to a post on the r/homebridge subreddit from NorthernMan5, one of the GitHub core maintainers.

It took Tim Cook years to launch Apple into major new hardware categories, such as the smartwatch. But John Ternus could start his tenure right away with an ambitious new project: smart home hardware.

All signs point to a strong lineup of new smart home devices coming potentially this fall, putting Apple back in the game in a category where it has been painfully slow to ship new devices.

Ikea’s popular Varmblixt lamp just got a smart home glow-up. The delightfully bulbous light now features color-changing, dimming, and smart home control. I tested the new smart lamp in my daughter’s room and found it made a great bedside lamp and added a fun touch of ambiance to her space. While she’s rarely a fan of me adding smart tech to her room, she did give this an “It’s nice” accolade — high praise from my 15-year-old.

The donut lamp, as it’s known for its distinctive shape resembling everyone’s favorite sweet treat, can be wall-mounted or set flat on a table. It comes with a long power cable, which helps with placement, and differs from its non-smart counterpart in that it has a matte finish rather than the original’s glossy glow. The matte does look quite stylish and helps accentuate the new colors — the old version only glows orange.