Smart Home IoT: Current Development, Bottlenecks, and Optimization Strategies
The Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence have advanced quickly, and with shifting consumer behaviors, the smart home has become the most promising field of IoT application. Rapid growth, however, has exposed persistent weaknesses in interoperability, security, and reliability that slow adoption. This paper analyses the deployment of smart home IoT and the obstacles it faces. The paper first clarifies the concept of the smart home and its underlying IoT infrastructure, then reviews the industry's evolution, and finally assesses the domestic market from four angles: overall scale, penetration rate, major platforms and ecosystems, and typical application scenarios. It then identifies five recurring problems—limited interoperability and ecosystem fragmentation, security and privacy hazards, conflicting automation logic and unreliable operation, a weak user experience, and high cost and energy use alongside lagging standards—and proposes strategies built around unified standards, security-oriented design, conflict detection and mitigation, edge computing with AI, and aging-friendly design. Methodologically, the study combines literature review, case analysis, and industry statistics. It concludes that China's smart home market, though large and fast-growing, remains in a growth phase, and that its tensions are best resolved through stronger standards, a security-first stance, and a systems perspective. Finally, since closed commercial ecosystems provide no usable means of detecting rule conflicts, the study put forward a black-box, log-driven approach to conflict identification and severity assessment that requires neither platform source code nor proprietary interfaces. Unlike techniques that depend on open APIs or runtime instrumentation, it can inform risk governance in multi-brand smart homes and the drafting of technical standards.