At IFA 2026, manufacturers unveiled advanced AI-driven smart-home systems emphasising local storage, interoperability, and ease of use, though challenges remain in delivering truly user-friendly and integrated solutions amidst consumer concerns about privacy and complexity.
Berlin’s smart-home launches this week pointed in one direction: bigger local models, more storage and more autonomous decision-making in the home. Yet the clearest message from consumer research is much simpler. Buyers want fewer apps, easier set-up and a system that does not make ordinary household tasks feel like IT administration. That tension was visible across IFA 2026, where Anker, Ugreen and LG each promoted new AI-led control layers just as surveys from Horowitz Research and IFA’s own market studies showed that cost, privacy and complexity remain the main obstacles to wider adoption.
Anker’s answer is MindBase, presented by Tom’s Guide as the standout item in a 22-product IFA launch and described by T3 as the centrepiece of the company’s wider home push. The hub is designed to connect Anker devices with Matter-compatible products from other brands, while also working with Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Home Assistant. Both publications said it offers up to 48TB of expandable local storage and uses dedicated AI agents across different areas of the home. T3 added that the first MindBase-based product will be a security kit due later this year, built to work with the Eufy TrackLight Cam S1, the Eufy Video Doorbell S4 and existing Eufy security hardware, with footage transfer available for HomeBase S380 users.
Ugreen has taken the idea further, framing HomeAgent not simply as a hub but as a network-attached storage system with embedded AI. Tom’s Guide reported that the company plans three versions: the HA100, HA100 Pro and MasterAgent MA100. It listed price bands ranging from $899/$1,799 for the base model to $9,999/$19,999 for the top-end MA100, which it said uses Nvidia’s Jetson Thor T5000 and is rated at 2,070 TFLOPS of compute. The publication said the system can recognise people, vehicles, pets and packages in recorded footage, generate alerts for unusual activity, summarise events and search clips by keyword. It also said the Pro model adds more advanced scene understanding and natural-language automations, while a companion speaker running the “Uliya” assistant is set to cost $99, or $69 on pre-order.
LG’s pitch is broader again. In its IFA announcement, the company presented ThinQ Claw as a text-chat AI agent for its AI Home platform, built to understand intent and context rather than rely on conventional automation menus. LG said the system can work across appliances, calendars and connected services, and can learn a household’s preferences over time. More importantly, the company linked that interface to a wider platform strategy built around Homey, the smart-home software from Athom that LG acquired in 2024. According to LG, Homey is being used to manage products from different manufacturers in one place, while a Home Energy Management System demonstration at IFA shows how appliances, solar panels, batteries, EV chargers and smart meters could be co-ordinated in real time. Baek Seung-tae, president of LG’s Home Appliance Solution Company, said ThinQ Claw “marks the next step in LG AI Home”.
That emphasis on orchestration sounds close to what consumers have been asking for, but Horowitz Research suggests the industry still has not solved the practical problem. Its June 2025 findings showed that 64% of smart-home users believe connected devices have improved their quality of life, 60% want to add more devices and 53% say the technology has saved them money over time. Even so, the same study found that 70% of people with at least two smart-home devices would rather manage everything through one central hub, while 56% worry about privacy and 43% feel overwhelmed by the number of options on the market. As Adriana Waterston of Horowitz Research put it, there is still “no one-step solution to install multiple smart devices or reset them all at once if they get disconnected.”
IFA’s own market research points to the same mismatch from another angle. The event organiser said convenience is the main reason 57% of consumers buy smart products, followed by energy considerations at 46% and long-term savings at 36%. At the same time, 45% cited high cost as a barrier and 41% cited privacy concerns. The report argued that AI matters when it improves core functions such as navigation, energy saving or personalisation, not simply because it exists as a headline feature. It also noted that smart TVs have reached an 84% market share because the benefit is easy to understand, while the wider smart-home category still depends on clear use cases and affordable entry points.
This leaves the latest IFA launches in an awkward position. They are trying to reassure buyers by moving intelligence into the home, keeping more data local and widening support for standards such as Matter. Anker is stressing interoperability and local storage; Ugreen is combining surveillance, backup and automation in one box; LG is tying AI chat to device control and household energy management. But none of that automatically answers the complaint that too many smart homes remain fragmented, hard to maintain and expensive to expand. In other words, the technical architecture is becoming more ambitious before the user experience has become consistently straightforward.
The most credible route forward may be the least glamorous one. The products unveiled in Berlin suggest manufacturers now understand that privacy, interoperability and local control cannot be treated as secondary concerns. The harder task is turning those principles into systems that feel ordinary to live with: one dashboard instead of several, fewer manual resets, clearer savings on energy and a reliable connection between brands. If that does not happen, the market risks producing increasingly capable homes that still ask too much of the people living in them.
Disclaimer: This content is intended for informational purposes only. Readers are advised to exercise their own judgement, conduct due diligence, or consult a qualified expert before acting on any information provided.
