Never trust cloud solutions when it isn’t your cloud.
My previous house was smart down to nearly every light being RGB Hue. For movie nights it kicked ass to be able to sync the lights in my living room / kitchen to the movie.
The challenge in IoT is the “I”. Many companies make cheap products that REQUIRE internet to work and are not going to work longer than a decade in most cases.
When I was designing that house I had made it a point to not purchase any device that was not Zigbee, Z-Wave or Natively compatible with HomeKit which led to a very robust setup that would continue to function even when the internet was down.
If you are dabbling I recommend making the same decision even if you plan to use GoogleHome or Alexa. The HomeKit compatible things usually cost more for a reason.
The only devices I have that are on Wi-Fi are ones I got before learning about HA. Zigbee FTW 👍
This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience
The best possibile experience is having a single app that can do the whole house, not a broken proprietary app that occupies 200 mb of space on the phone and that takes 5 seconds to start because of its fancy splash screen
Don’t understand this, they are actively kicking out customers
Ah yes best possibile experience is this: (from the ars Technica article about it)
“Sadly, this app now displays advertisement at the very top and I cannot find a way to disable it,” writes one Play Store reviewer (Google doesn’t provide links to reviews). “This is very disturbing and on top of it, it moves my garage opening button out of the visible part of the screen. So to use it I now have to first look at the ads, then scroll down and hope to find my button.”
This is what it looks like now. The ad always occupies that space at the top
Companies should be held accountable for bullshit like that.
My idea goes like this: In order to be able to sell some device you need to deposit its source code and the sources for all updates with the proper authorities.
If you then don’t provide updates maintaining a) security and b) functionality of said device, because for example you go bankrupt, financially, or like in this very case morally, all of those sources are released and from then on are open source.
A Deadman switch on the source sounds like an eff thing. I’d support it. Heck, while I was still maintaining a well-used oss app, I’d’ve wanted a Deadman switch on the signing keys so distro could continue without stress, but the sad fact was no one picked up my project even when I announced its impending doom.
This shit makes me fucking howl with laughter every time. Anyone that expects a device with a vendor supplied cloud connection to not get bricked a couple years after release is a goddamn idiot.
This is why I just wired a zigbee relay in parallel with the wall button for my generic garage door opener
This is the way. At least you can troubleshoot it and it doesn’t need an internet connection. The amount of HA users that still rely on outside APIs is ridiculous. I won’t run anything that needs an internet connection to work, that’s the litmus test.
