Overrated – Smart Home Manager Review

There is nothing ‘smart’ about this app at all. First off, it refuses to remember my login, throwing a ‘service error’ every time I load the app, forcing me through the login loop. Secondly there are zero controls for actually managing your network. No port forwarding, no NAT controls, no DHCP settings, etc. (yes, you can’t even change the subnet used for the internal network, so you’re screwed if it conflicts with something else.) The only thing that is _remotely_ smart about this app is that you can assign profiles to people in the household and (manually) assign devices to each profile (but good luck determining which “AppleDevice” or “AndroidDevice” is whose). You can then set schedules per profile. However there is nothing that breaks down bandwidth usage by profile or device, so you can’t tell who your bandwidth hogs are. Even worse is the app’s (or maybe more correctly, the service’s) ‘security’ setting. It’s on, or off. That’s it. No controls over security levels, no proactive whitelisting or blacklisting. No protocol filters, no rate limits. No transparency. The ‘security’ amounts to an after-the-fact alert that an insecure URL was blocked, with an option to whitelist that hostname. No context. No URL-level details (e.g the actual URL in question, just the hostname). You have no idea what is in the master blacklist, nor who controls it. So far (2 months of service) it’s had a 99% false positive rate. So, you might like the service from AT&T. You might like the price, or the performance, but this app doesn’t have any positive traits to add to the experience. Ultimately, the best way to manage your AT&T network is to setup a completely separate network router that actually has some kind of controls and ignore this app altogether. Unfortunately, since you have so few options in this app - you cannot turn off the AT&T router’s WiFi, nor set it into bridge mode - that means you’ll have two WiFi networks and a double-NAT setup, but at least you’ll be able to see what’s going on with your network.
Review by arethereanynicksthatwork on Smart Home Manager.