The company eZLO has recently announced their acquisition on MiOS as they seek to expand their reach within the market of home automation. MiOS is most well known for their smart home platform, as well as their Vera brand of home controllers.
The Vera controllers used to be our favorite when it came to extended configuration and advanced access to features you couldn’t quite find in most of the competing solutions. The ability to code your way to a solution if a plugin isn’t already available to you was one of their strongest features. Second to that is their massive community of users online who share their thoughts and requests within their forums, leading to all sorts of wild ideas and conclusions.
In recent years however, Vera has been falling dry with their controllers not being as responsive as users would like, and the devs haven’t been focusing as hard on modern compatibilities as they should be. Their latest smart home controllers have support for many device types, including Z-Wave (their main purpose), Zigbee, Bluetooth and more. However, they lack compatibility with other platforms like Google Assistant and IFTTT, which is bringing most of the competing hubs and devices together in every way you can imagine. They only recently within the last year rolled Alexa compatibility out of beta with some success. Because of this inability to keep up with modern cross-compatibilities and support, we found ourselves leaning towards alternative options when it comes to testing Z-Wave related tech here at the office.
Now, with eZLO stepping in, we are beginning to see some of the busiest traffic when it comes to community interaction and change. One of these changes is discussion about a new UI (UI8) that looks as though they are making a solid attempt at cleaning up the user interface and giving it a more modern approach. So far only the mobile interface has been hinted to, as you can see from the image to the right, but it’s a start in the right direction. Now they are reaching out to the community looking for feedback so that they can better understand what their customers are looking for.
Hopefully with this new transition, eZLO will be able to bring the MiOS platform and Vera products back into the spotlight once again. If so, you might even see us sampling their solutions once again.
