Nearly half of American households now own at least one smart home device, and the fastest-moving part of the market is no longer the front porch. Parks Associates found that 45% of U.S. households owned at least one smart home device as of early 2025, up from 38% just two years earlier, according to the research firm’s smart home dashboard research.
That steady climb, though, is masking a real shift in what people are actually buying. Parks Associates researcher Jennifer Kent described 2025 as something close to a “cooling off period” for the devices that built the category in the first place: video doorbells, after nearly a decade of steady year-over-year growth, have started to see adoption drop, and standalone smart cameras have slipped too.
The Category Nobody’s Talking About
A separate, more recent nationwide survey published by Reviews.org in April 2026 shows just how crowded the field has gotten around security. Video doorbells still lead individual device categories at 38.89% ownership, with outdoor cameras close behind at 32.39%. But smart thermostats (30.52%), smart lightbulbs and lighting hubs (24.44%), and robot vacuums (23.50%) are now bunched right underneath — categories that have almost nothing to do with keeping an eye on the front door.
Robot vacuums in particular are pulling even with, and in some counts edging past, indoor security cameras (23.88%), a gap that would have looked strange five years ago when cameras and doorbells were the devices everyone bought first.
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The average American household now manages 11 connected devices total, per the same Reviews.org data, once phones, TVs, and streaming gadgets are counted alongside dedicated smart home products. Smart TVs alone sit at 68.26% ownership and smart speakers at 36.29%, both well ahead of any single security category.
Why the Shift Is Happening
Parks Associates points to a change in who’s buying. The average number of devices per smart-home-owning household has actually fallen, from a pandemic-era peak of 8 down to 6.2, because so many of the new adopters are mainstream buyers picking up one or two affordable devices rather than early adopters wiring up an entire house. Kent’s research team noted that “mainstream households with 1-5 devices now outnumber the smart home-enthusiast households with 6+ devices,” a sign that the market has moved past its early hobbyist phase.
That mainstream buyer looks less interested in monitoring their front step and more interested in convenience: a thermostat that saves on the energy bill, a lightbulb that can be dimmed from a phone, or a vacuum that runs itself while nobody’s home. Prices across the board have also ticked up slightly, according to Parks Associates, which may be nudging budget-conscious households toward devices that pay for themselves rather than ones bought purely for peace of mind.
None of this means security devices are going away. Video doorbells and outdoor cameras remain the single most-owned smart home categories in the country, and Reviews.org’s data shows they’re still ahead of every lifestyle device by a wide margin. But the days when “smart home” was shorthand for “camera on the porch” appear to be ending. The next device a household buys is now just as likely to be a thermostat, a lightbulb, or a vacuum that never has to see the front door at all.
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