I'm looking to get some smart light switches/dimmers (zigbee or matter if that's relevant), and one of the requirements for me is that if the switches aren't connected to the network, they would behave like regular dumb switches/dimmers. No one ever advertises anything except the "ideal" behaviour when it's connected with a hub and their proprietary app and everything, so I haven't been able to find any information on this.
So my question: is this the default behaviour for most switches? Are there any that don't do this? What should I look out for given this requirement?
Edit: Thanks for the responses. Considering that no one has experienced switches that didn't behave this way nor heard of any, I'm proceeding with the assumption that any switch should be fine. I got myself some TP Link Kasa KS220 dimmers and it works pretty well. Installation was tough due to its size. Took me about an hour of wrangling the wires so that it would fit in the box. Dimming also isn't as smooth as I'd like, but it works. I haven't had a chance to set it up with Home Assistant yet since the OS keeps breaking every time I run an update and I haven't had time to fix it after the last one. Hopefully it integrates smoothly when I do get to it.
I believe the Inovelli Blue Series dimmer switch does exactly this. I have it networked through some zigbee usb controller I bought and is entirely managed via Home Assistant. I haven’t tested it non-networked but I don’t think there would be any issue using the functionality directly from the switch.
But it can also work the other way if you want to
Inovelli blue in the standard configuration works like a switch. Without a hub, it’s still a switch
However you can also configure it passthrough - always pass power through and act as a Zigbee button. In that case I’d expect a direct pairing to still work like a switch. However I believe you can passthrough but not be paired directly to the device so maybe that configuration would not work if the hub died
Thanks! I made an update to the OP if you want to see what I ended up doing.