Insteon users have a reason to be hopeful about their investment in the ecosystem. The Insteon mobile app, which was released in private beta last September, is now available as a public beta. You’ll still need to jump through a couple of registration hoops to get into it, but access is essentially instantaneous.
Our previous story about the beta launch has many of the details about what you can expect from the new app, so that’s a good place to start. However, we’ve learned about some other limitations with the new app. There are some devices that aren’t supported. Those include the mini remotes and I/O Linc dry contact devices. Support for them will be added later. Unfortunately, Insteon’s notes also indicate that the Insteon Thermostat will not be supported. Maybe it’s time to switch to a Nest thermostat, but that isn’t supported by Insteon anymore, either. The new app also doesn’t support device notifications yet, and if you create a new scene you must assign it to a single room.
You can have both versions of the Insteon app installed on your mobile device at the same time, so if you need to control some of those unsupported devices you still have that option. Don’t expect any more changes to the old app though.
Insteon is targeting a public release of the new app in four to six weeks. That seems awfully ambitious to us considering the list of features that still need to be addressed. Regardless of that, the new app does show great progress from the smart home company and we’re excited to see where they go from here. If you’d like to get access to the Insteon beta app, head over to the Insteon Mobile App Public Beta site for complete details.
