Still on duty. May 2023.

A lot of our business at Bright Wire is ripping out expensive, dealer-locked automation platforms. Savant, Crestron, Control4 — systems that work, sometimes beautifully, but lock the customer into calling a dealer every time something needs to change. Most of the people who call us don't want that. They want to feel like they own the thing in their hand and can reprogram it themselves without paying someone else to do it.

There's a real caveat here: some customers genuinely don't care what it costs, they just want it to work, no questions asked. For those people, Control4 or Crestron can be the right answer. But that's not who this post is about. The customer I'm talking about is the three-hundred-dollar remote customer, not the eleven-hundred-dollar one. And for years, that customer had a great option: Logitech Harmony.

Almost every TV installation we do involves some combination of a soundbar, a receiver, a game console, a streaming box. Sometimes CEC — the handshake protocol that lets one remote talk to multiple HDMI devices — can stitch all of that together into one remote experience. Sometimes it can't. CEC is flaky. Devices don't always play nice with each other, and you end up with a coffee table covered in remotes, or you buy a universal remote to fix it.

For a long time, Harmony was that fix. The Companion, with its smart home buttons for lights and plugs, retailed around a hundred fifty dollars. The Elite, the fuller remote-and-hub combo, ran about three hundred fifty. Neither was cheap, but both were affordable enough to put in front of a normal homeowner without a second mortgage.

What actually happened when Logitech walked away

Then Logitech quietly walked away from the category. Harmony is discontinued in every way that matters: no new hardware, no more units being made, no meaningful updates. The servers that keep everything syncing are still running for the newer Elite, Companion, and Hub lineup, and by most accounts they still work fine today. But the older Harmony software, the one a lot of longtime users relied on, lost server access back in the spring of 2025, and reprogramming or adding a device on those units just stopped working entirely.

Your Harmony still works — that's not the problem

Here's the important nuance, though: none of this means existing remotes stop working day to day. Our own house is full of Harmony remotes, still running great, every day, no problems. Pressing buttons, running your activities, all of that logic lives locally on the hub. The real forcing function isn't that people's remotes are failing. It's that Logitech isn't making them anymore. Whatever's on the shelf at retailers is whatever's left. So the day your remote actually breaks and needs replacing, you're stuck. And if you're shopping for a universal remote today, brand new, you're also stuck, because the good, affordable option just isn't for sale anymore. It's only a matter of time before the servers for the newer hardware go the same way the old ones did.

The replacements, such as they are

We've installed Sofabaton's X1 and X2 units in a handful of homes, and for the price they work well. But they have their own hub connection quirks, and their integration options outside of Home Assistant are thin, and Home Assistant is a bridge too far, technically, for most of our customers.

So the category just has a hole in it now. Three-hundred-dollar universal remote, no dealer lock-in, real smart-home button support, solid reliability — that space is basically empty.

For everyone else in this business, the bigger story is what happens when a category leader just leaves without a replacement lined up. Customers don't stop needing the thing. They just stop having a good way to get it.

I'll say plainly: I'm actually building something to fill it myself. It's an early-stage project, and I'm not going to get into the details of how it works here, but the short version is I got tired of waiting for someone else to build the thing Harmony used to be, so I started building it.

That's the part of this story that isn't finished yet.

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