this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
246 points (93.6% liked)
Technology
59192 readers
2629 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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).
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).
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.