Chandra believes we are entering the fourth stage of computing. "We went from PC to web, web to mobile, and now we're going from mobile to ambient," he said. Ambient computing is the idea that devices like sensors, speakers and displays are embedded in the environment all around you -- thus, "ambient." Chandra also calls this distributed computing as opposed to integrated. In the latter, all the parts of the computer are in one central hub or device. Distributed computing, meanwhile, has its components scattered across a space. In Chandra's mind, these pieces fall into three categories: sensors, inputs and outputs. An input is something like a microphone in a remote or smart speaker or a touchscreen on a connected display while an output could be an Android TV, an Echo speaker or even a Philips Hue light.

There are a variety of devices that make up this ecosystem, and therein lies the problem: It's not convenient for the consumer. "There's no one thing I can put in my home and just put in the wall and be like, 'Oh, now it's all smart,'" Chandra said. Individual smart home companies sell bits and pieces of a puzzle, and to be fair, they're not wrong to focus on making the things they're good at making. Philips Hue, for example, has focused on lights, and part of its strategy has been "to ensure that partner brands work seamlessly with (its products)," according to the company's head of technology, George Yianni.

But fragmentation creates friction.

"As an industry, we're giving all the building blocks for this notion of a smart home, right? We sell you a thermostat, we sell you a camera, we sell you smart speakers, smart display, whatever it might be," Chandra said. "But then we ask the consumer to actually build the house."

This process of building the house is made even more challenging by the fact that there are so many different standards and protocols. Each company has its own app that you need to install. Some of them connect to your WiFi, others use Bluetooth. It used to be that you had to buy a separate hub to connect different brands of products to your home network. Thankfully, the industry has wised up and we're seeing signs of improvement -- brand-specific hubs are pretty much gone.

A spokesperson for Canary told Engadget "We wouldn't say the industry right now is immensely fragmented — if anything, the industry is now more consolidated than it has ever been."

But there's still no unified platform, and it's one of the biggest hurdles to the "smart home" becoming ubiquitous.

Niccolo de Masi, chief innovation officer at Honeywell spinoff Resideo, agrees. He told Engadget, "The home is becoming more complex faster than the average homeowner can keep up with." He added that consumers are still confused, frustrated and distrustful of their smart home devices. "This is the opposite of how they're supposed to work," he said.

Not only are there too many disparate products, but also they neither communicate with each other nor do they understand context. Your devices should know what you like and where you are so they can respond to you in the appropriate place. That's not quite the case right now.