Smart Home Upgrades That Actually Eliminate Daily Chores

Android Authority's latest curation of upgrades that make everyday life easier actually tries to answer a harder question: which devices genuinely remove a chore instead of just relocating it to your phone.

The pool chore that finally automates itself

The clearest example is a surface skimmer that thinks for itself. Beatbot's iSkim is a dedicated pool-surface cleaner with a 9-liter debris basket rated to hold up to 800 leaves before it needs emptying. A 10,000mAh battery paired with a 24W solar panel pushes runtime to 28 hours even without sunlight, and a feature called SolarTrack reorients the unit toward the sunniest patch of water to top up during the day. SonicSense ultrasonic sensors steer around obstacles, a pair of guided wheels keep edges and corners scratch-free, and an anti-spill inlet closes whenever the robot reverses or turns so captured leaves and pollen don't drop back out. When the battery dips low, or you tap the return button in the app, it heads back to the pool edge on its own. For anyone already running a floor-and-wall robot, this is the missing piece that closes the loop on full-pool automation without paying flagship-tier money.

One speaker, fewer remotes, cleaner topology

The latest Echo Studio is 40% smaller than the original but keeps spatial audio and Dolby Atmos support, with a multi-driver array that includes a woofer and upward- and side-firing units. Room adaptation listens to the space and retunes playback on the fly. The win for tinkerers: it doubles as the Alexa-compatible control surface for lights, plugs, sensors, and the rest of your kit, and you can pair two of them to a Fire TV for stereo. It is still a walled garden, but if you are already living inside Alexa, consolidating hub duties into a device that also pulls sound duty is a leaner topology than scattering logic across three boxes on the shelf.

What to watch on the TV side

Two recent stories on adjacent platforms underline why ecosystem choice still matters more than spec sheets. Android Police reports that Pac-Man literally took over Samsung smart TVs to push a home-internet share campaign, while Chosun notes Samsung and LG have begun removing vulnerable smart TV apps. The first is a marketing gimmick; the second is the real headline. App stores on big-screen OSes are shifting under your feet, and any automation you build around a vendor's app catalog needs a fallback path before you start depending on it.