The Great Starling home Hub Has Been Discontinued

The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy bore bad news: the Starling Home Hub is dead.

“In a message on its website, Starling said it can no longer manufacture the hub due to ‘rapidly rising costs of doing business for small US-based product companies like us (most significantly, tariffs the US government charges us to obtain the components we need to build our product),’” Tuohy somberly reported on Wednesday.

Indeed, the brief message on the homepage of Starling’s website says the company will continue to provide technical support to its customers (yours truly amongst the lot) “as long as we can.” They further note their goal is to maintain enough inventory of its diminutive $99 box “to be able to honor product warranties for existing customers.”

I’m writing this story in mourning; the Starling Home Hub has played an integral role in my HomeKit-based smart home setup for years. As Tuohy writes, Nest devices have never featured native support for Apple Home for people who prefer both HomeKit and the Apple-like design sensibilities of, say, Nest’s thermostats. I’ve written before about how we have a number of Nest products in our home, albeit older ones like the Nest E and Nest Hello, and they continue to work with aplomb—especially since they’re also “integrated” into Apple Home. I suppose whenever the time comes that Starling’s device ceases functionality, I’ll begrudgingly shift to the Google Home app on iOS, but I’ll sure miss the Starling Home Hub. It was, and continues to be for now, a simple, truly plug-and-play solution that really does make my smart home devices more accessible.