Some of the drawbacks (at present) of a Home Automation system are;
1. There aren’t any flawless retrofit solutions available yet: If you’re building a new home, then wired solutions work great but for customers with existing homes there hasn’t yet come a solution to have them on-board the ‘Smart Home’ revolution
2. Home Automation is still an expensive product, by Indian consumer standards, and there’s a lot of scope of the prices to be whittled down by an order of magnitude at least in the next few years. This will happen as more Indian companies manufacture the key components of Automation systems (controllers, Gateways etc) and economies of scale takes over.
3. For now, Smart home solutions work well in silos (Lighting, HVAC and Audio/Video automation works very well currently) but can be made a lot more holistic to include all the gadgets in your home. This should be possible in the next 3–5 years as more appliances become ‘smart’ and new strides are made in the IoT space