RN
Every category with a hardware refresh cycle produces the same annual article, and the tell is always that the breakthroughs have no model numbers attached. "AI that learns what you like." "Materials indistinguishable from skin." "Devices that respond in real time." Those are not descriptions of products. They are descriptions of a product category, written so they cannot be wrong.
Underneath, some things really did change. They are just not the five you would guess.
Connectivity, which is genuinely different and genuinely a liability
App control and long-distance operation are the real change of the last decade — not because a Bluetooth radio is clever, but because it turns a self-contained object into an account. Once there is an account there is a server, a login, a support desk, and a log of what you did and when.
The category has now been tested on that twice, publicly, and it did not go well either time.
In 2017 the maker of We-Vibe agreed to pay $3.75 million to settle a US class action alleging that its companion app collected identifiable usage data — including vibration intensity and the dates and times of each session — and tied it to users. The settlement was reported to allocate about $3 million to app users and the remainder to purchasers, alongside a commitment to destroy the collected data.
In 2025 researchers disclosed two flaws in Lovense's platform: one that returned a user's registered email address given only their username, and one that allowed taking over an account without its password. The account-takeover bug was fixed. The email-disclosure bug was initially assigned a remediation estimate of over a year, on the grounds that fixing it would break older app versions — then shipped within days once the reporting ran.
Take those together and the pattern is clear enough. The engineering to connect a device to a phone is trivial and long since solved. The engineering to hold identity data belonging to people for whom exposure is the entire risk is not trivial, and it is the part the category has repeatedly under-resourced. A username-to-email lookup is a nothing bug in most products. Here it is a doxxing primitive.
The AI claim, weighed honestly
"Learns your preferences" is doing a lot of work in this category, and in most products it describes a settings memory and a pattern selector — you liked this one, here it is again — which is a feature from the 1990s with a new noun in front of it.
There are real signal-processing improvements. Pressure and motion sensors are cheaper and better, closed-loop control that adjusts to what the sensor reads is genuinely implemented in some devices, and the difference is noticeable. That is worth having. It is also not what "AI that anticipates your desires" is describing, and the gap between the two is where the marketing budget lives.
The practical test on any such claim: ask what the device measures, and what it does with the measurement. A vendor that can answer both has built something. A vendor that answers with adjectives has not.
The part with no breakthrough at all
Materials are where the category's oldest problem sits, and 2024 did not solve it.
In the US, the FDA regulates devices that make a medical or therapeutic claim. Pleasure products do not make one — the "for novelty use only" label is precisely the mechanism for staying outside that scope — so nothing requires a manufacturer to test what a product is made of before selling it for internal use. Peer-reviewed analysis has found phthalates in products marketed as phthalate-free, which tells you what the marketing claim is worth on its own.
"Body-safe" has no legal definition anywhere. The phrases that do mean something are the boring ones: ISO 10993 biocompatibility testing, USP Class VI, and non-porous materials — silicone, borosilicate glass, stainless steel — that can actually be cleaned rather than merely wiped. Porous materials cannot be sterilised, which matters more for anything shared than any feature on the box.
What to ask before buying anything connected
Four questions, and they are all answerable before you spend money.
Does it work without the app? If the physical controls do everything the basic modes need, an abandoned server is an inconvenience rather than a brick.
What is the account for? Firmware updates justify an account. A pattern library does not need your email address, and neither does a vibrator.
Has the vendor published a security contact and handled a report? Every vendor has bugs. The signal is whether there is a disclosure address, a published response, and evidence of a fix that shipped — that history is public, and it is the single most informative thing you can look up about a connected device.
What is it made of, and who tested that? A named material plus a named test standard, or treat the claim as decoration.
None of that is exciting, which is the trouble with writing a breakthroughs list honestly. If you want to browse the actual market rather than the adjectives, the sex toy retailers are indexed here by shop, and the doll and simulator sellers are a separate shelf with a very different set of questions attached.