Even as I complain about this, I’m reminded of the adage: the shoemaker’s children have bare feet.

Some readers may already know my home entertainment system is a work in progress. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Back when I was training as a system designer, one lesson drilled into us was to identify and eliminate potential points of failure. Sure, professionalism is about how you solve problems, but it’s even more professional to prevent them in the first place.

Or, as my mother used to say, it’s OK to make mistakes — as long as you make new ones and don’t repeat the old ones.

Sometimes, though, problems show up that you just didn’t or couldn’t foresee.

And that brings me to my ongoing frustration with DIY home control. The issue, boiled down, is this:

Childish inter-brand rivalries.

Anyone who’s spent time shopping for smart home gear — cameras, thermostats, displays — knows you have to check and double-check which ecosystem it supports. Google Home? Apple HomeKit? Alexa? You’d better know before you buy.

Even something as simple as controlling a TV gets messy. For example, Apple HomeKit doesn’t support Samsung TVs. They’re rivals, sure, but also collaborators. The only thing stopping Siri from controlling my TV is a licensing agreement and some code — neither of which are in my control.

That’s where third-party control systems come in. Brands like Crestron and Extron have built their reputations on bridging these gaps reliably. In my case, our living room system is small, and I’ve been using the Roomie Remote app for years. It’s mostly functional.

But recently, I had an issue. While I eventually figured it out, the process was frustrating enough that I started looking for alternatives.

And I didn’t love what I found.

Doing my “Google University” research, most of the results I found — Reddit posts, support forums — pointed to third-party solutions built to overcome the same interoperability issues I was facing.

Sounds promising, right? So, what’s under the hood?

In many cases, it’s a Raspberry Pi with a network port and a Linux install that someone is marketing to DIYers. That’s fine. That’s how the marketplace works.

If you’re a tech nerd with time on your hands and you like digging through forum posts to keep your setup working —more power to you. I respect that. But I’m not that person.

I want my gear to work together. I don’t want to spend hours a week forcing it to.

And even if I were that person, my family wouldn’t be thrilled if I set up a home server just to make rival brands in the house cooperate.

In my opinion, if your smart home setup relies on an active DIY user base and a jungle of third-party fixes, it’s not an ecosystem — it’s life support.

Back to that earlier issue. One thing Roomie Remote does well is integrate with iOS Shortcuts. That lets anyone in my house say, “Hey Siri, watch Apple TV,” and the system powers up the Samsung TV, Integra AVR, and switches inputs.

Simple, clean automation.

Until it stopped working.

And I’m a little embarrassed by how long it took me to figure out why.

Turns out, iOS will offload apps it thinks you’re not using. For whatever reason, it offloaded the Shortcuts app. When I reinstalled it, my custom shortcuts didn’t reappear—until I restarted the phone. Then, like magic, everything worked again.

A simple solution.

For a problem that shouldn’t have happened.

But as they say: good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

I’ve now gone into Settings > App Store and disabled “Offload Unused Apps.”

That said, it’s probably only a matter of time before I call up one of my AV dealers and ask them to install a proper control system — just so I don’t have to deal with this nonsense anymore.