Unless you know something I don't, I think you're completely incorrect on both counts. Z-Wave isn't going anywhere, just a few years ago the Z-Wave alliance published Z-Wave+ and more and more consumer devices have been coming to market. They're all over Home Depot (among other large retailers) and backed by very large brands [0]. All major hubs support it, and z-wave offers many specific technical and security advantages over WiFi with respect to automation.

Z-wave has a much smaller threat surface area and requires no internet. In fact, it requires no central controller at all, as you can have controllers in every room for scene automation. The internet connected hubs bring a lot of shiny features to the table, but they're completely unnecessary for local automation. Even better, communication forwarding is part of the design so you can have a controller hundreds of meters away from the thing you want controlled and as long as there are a couple of devices on the mesh between them it will work. We've seen how great WiFi repeaters are... plus WiFi on battery is basically a deal breaker, whereas you can have z-wave devices last two years on some AA batteries.

Z-Wave and Zigbee are both so much better than WiFi at automation that I can't even fathom why someone would suggest the opposite.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave

I wouldn't say that it is getting replaced with wifi. But z-wave is definitely getting replaced by Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and Thread. (all of which aren't compatible with z-wave's proprietary hardware.) Also the entrance of the long awaited Bluetooth mesh, will have interesting effects on the market.

If market forces play out logically, Z-wave should lose out to any of: Zigbee, Thread, Bluetooth mesh, or 802.11ah (HaLow).

Z-wave is a proprietary protocol. Only 1 company has the IP & monopoly on manufacturing Z-wave chips... By contrast, any of these other techs are open and have multiple implementations available from multiple manufacturers.

History has not been kind to proprietary networking protocols, and it's winning at scale rarely about just technical advantages. I know they have opened up more in the past year or two, but it may be too late.

I refine my comment to capture BTLE as one of the protocols going forward, in addition to wifi.

I'll grant you BTLE and/or something more open ascending over Z-Wave or Zigbee, but I've got to imagine that's years out. If I was picking something for the next 5 years I'd still pick Z-Wave over the WiFi IoT horror show.

Also, there is a lot of inertia in the home automation space. Hue is all Zigbee, and is one of the biggest off the shelf IoT platforms right now. The door lock space is mostly z-wave. Friends that I have that have a mix of these things are more and more putting their energy into z-wave as it's far more reliable than wifi, having the advantages of the mesh network, and living in a non crowded spectrum.

Is there any concern that Z-Wave and Zigbee could/will be reduced to nothing more than a tinkerers platform after both Apple and Google grab more of the market (both of which appear to be building systems backed by Wi-Fi and Bluetooth)?

I don't know if Apple is going to go anywhere with Homekit as it sounds (third hand reports) like it's more expensive to get products HomeKit ready over just using other protocols, or paying a license to Z-Wave or Zigbee.

That being said, some combination of BT/LE/Mesh + WiFi and/or some other networking protocol would probably win very quickly if it wasn't encumbered with large licensing costs.

Fair enough, but it does appear Apple is committed to HomeKit; this marks the third year in a row they've made major strides and improvements, with this year being the biggest in terms of licensing and implementation.

In some cases using WiFi makes sense, for example if you've got a mains powered device such as a camera, smart plug, or similar. However z-wave really comes into its own with remote battery powered devices - a properly configured motion sensor for example will easily last two years on a single 3.3v lithium battery. That's despite waking up every few hours to report its presence, and probably transmitting the presence of motion, temperature changes, light levels, and other data points far more frequently.

Not Wifi, but definitely should be BLE. ZWave is notoriously insecure, the available chips are extremely buggy, and the licensing requirements very expensive. I used to work on ZWave products and now work on BLE devices. BLE has been far more pleasant of an experience. And Bluetooth is getting mesh networking soon!

Z-wave plus at its core is fine, the protocol is pretty well designed for home automation, and at least the chips I've used have been fine. Sadly the ecosystem is a bit of a shitshow. Everything will work to some degree, but you'll probably end up spending an hour or two reverse engineering exactly how any given device communicates what its seeing, and what configuration is needed to avoid draining the batteries within a month or two.

I'm cautiously optimistic for Bluetooth Mesh giving z-wave a run for its money but its still very early days.

Z Wave+ addresses many of the security concerns of Z Wave (the licensing costs remain, obviously).

A lot of z-wave+ devices do not implement that security portion and it's a pain to set up on top of it.

Z-wave's biggest short coming in my opinion is how easy it is to overload the network. Turning off 40 lights at once has half of the operations drop off due to the network getting overloaded and just dropping commands. If you have a few devices reporting their power usage, the network becomes quickly overloaded and you get the same command dropping crap in even simple operations like 'turn on light 2 when light 1 turns on and vice versa'.

I have a condo with z-wave everything right now, but after seeing how much of a mess all IoT home automation crap is, I'm going to sit and wait until we have something that works properly that doesn't cost $60-$100 per light switch or require maintaining something complicated.

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IMO we should have a dual network solution. Something like wifi for plug in devices which also act as repeater networks for the battery powered BLE sensors and such.

I use Insteon. About 100 devices. Plugs, light switches, HVAC, leak sensors, motion sensors, cameras. Their support sucks when you have to deal with them and the programming of this then that is nowhere to be found. On the other hand I have had to deal with support twice and after pulling their heads from the ass they fixed the issues. Otherwise it pretty much just works and works as scale. These guys started with the X10 stuff in the 80s and are not going anywhere. So if you want something that will just work it is the best bet. They have a hub with HomeKit integration but I am not using it as they do not support some of the older door sensors with it yet.

Insteon sends packets concurrently via both radio and the power line. Devices also act as repeaters: there can be up to 4 hops to reach the destination. In theory this makes it one of the most reliable networking tech.

But it's dated (from the 1990s), there is zero encryption/authentication, and devices are kinda expensive.

It's not the lack of a dual link part, but the easy network bandwidth congestion part thats the problem with z-wave.

I used to use insteon in a small test build out, but got frustrated with their bad software support. You have to use a ~$300 hub with a $80 PLM modem before you can get something half decent. And Insteon devices having a reputation of breaking after a couple of years due to using cheap capacitors and such put me off from using it any further.

Absolutely agree. I have a z-wave alarm, and often times the automation rule will turn the alarm off, but will leave the strobe on. Sometimes lights will no turn on (or off). Sometimes some door sensors will report to be open when they are not.... it is a complete mess.

it's the ecosystem, you can find zwave switches, plugs, everywhere, there is no wifi switch I can find.

Esp8266 based wifi switches can be had quite cheap (sonoff is one of the brands)

looks perfect for my needs, is there any REST API documentation?

Dunno, but you can flash any esp8266 firmware onto it and roll your own API (or other smarts)

I mean write my own script to turn on/off the switch such as using wget or libcurl

Yeah, you could flash a simple Arduino sketch with such an API, and use that, assuming you can't access the in built API

tplink and belkin wemo both make WiFi switches and plugs.

IIRC the Belkin Wemo plug runs a full-blown Linux OS. Disgustingly over-engineered! Complex software & hardware means less reliability.

A remotely controlled plug should be running tens of kB of firmware, at most, and that includes crypto libraries. It shouldn't be running the megabytes of code that an embedded Linux OS represents.

Yuck.