Your smart home will never work properly unless you fix this first

There’s nothing more frustrating than smart home stuff that doesn’t work. You open the app, tap the button, wait… tap it again, still nothing. Or Alexa says “okay,” but the lights stay on anyway. I dealt with this constantly for way too long before I figured out what was going wrong. Spoiler: it wasn’t my router or internet speed; it was the fundamental way my devices were trying to communicate. Most budget smart home products rely entirely on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and that’s exactly where things fall apart.