this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Anyone who's serious about home automation eventually realizes that the only way to do it effectively is with locally controlled standards based devices like zwave and zigbee, and open source projects like home assistant and esp32.
Anything else will eventually be corrupted or abandoned by its corporate sponsor, as anyone who's tried it the other way can tell you.
The best case scenario is: when they cut off access there is a large enough public outcry that they immediately reverse position (until the next attempt).
Lots of these companies just go out of business and leave everyone stranded. But companies like Google don't give a fuck when they leave open source projects stranded like they did with the Nest API.
The issue is really with the business model of most IOT device makers. They sell you one device once and they're basically committing themselves to running cloud services for that device indefinitely. This only works while you're growing, and when sales start to plateau you're suddenly paying huge amounts of money to maintain the infrastructure with no money coming in.
Companies like Google, Apple and Amazon are big enough to absorb that, but the smaller ones will quickly start looking at ads and subscription fees.
It would be a lot better if device makers could just stick to building the hardware, after which the user just plugs it into their IOT provider of choice (which would be a subscription or something self hosted like Home Assistant).