- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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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).
The fact that there is basically no good “premium” options for smart devices, just cheap adware trash or more diy type stuff with home assistant and the like, tells me there is not much of a mainstream market for most of these devices to begin with. If your only niche is just the hobby crowd or shit that has to be so cheap that you can’t make a profit without riddling it with ads then it might not be a market worth getting into.
Apple TV seems to be doing just fine. Considering investing in one. I don’t think it’s likely they’ll start putting ads in the hone screen and such.
I’m converting from Firesticks once the new Apple TVs come out. I’m sick of the constant upselling and Amazon’s been putting much more effort into blocking me from using a custom launcher than basic stability and usability.
I really like the one I have. A relative has a much older model and it still works fine too.
It’s very responsive and the 4k models are quite powerful and future proofed IMO. If you have an iPhone you can quickly use it as a remote too.
Paired with infuse app it even does local streaming from my media server well.
And it’s cheaper to get this year’s top of the line Apple TV than it is the 2019 Nividia shield pro.
Smart devices are only useful if they are open source and everything can be self hosted. Everything else becomes a brick when the manufacturer drops support for it.
Exactly, I have been using some of the same zwave devices for over 10 years. I don’t buy anything that needs the Internet unless I don’t have a choice and that device is not mission critical. I build many of my devices with esp home also.
For now, hubitat seems to be a good balance between slowly improving the support and experience vs. price paid. I opted in for their subscription that does automatic backups with recovery to a different device and managed remote access and I’m satisfied with the value received for the subscription fee.
I doubt this will last; if they get successful enough, somebody will buy them like the Samsung / Smartthings scenario and the enshittification will begin (or accelerate, depending on your opinion of the status quo).
Hopefully by then homeseer has a robust hardware ecosystem and migrating isn’t very painful.
And the author is right, no need to touch Matter at this point if you’re already vested in Z-Wave or ZigBee.
But they can’t sell you more shit if they didn’t have planned obsolescence baked in!
(It’s a little sobering realizing that technology is old enough to be, you know, OLD. Nothing about this is novel to anybody anymore. We’re way, way past being impressed by two lines batting a dot around.)What’s an open source thermostat? My Nest is shit when it comes to connecting it to home assistant. It’s googles fault
I have a Honeywell t9 that is homekit enabled
I have nothing against advertising in general, but I won’t tolerate OS-level advertising and I don’t want ad-subsidized hardware.
Sorry, best we can do is a premium (expensive) ad-free tier that still advertises our own products.
I don’t have a problem with a streaming service doing that. Hardware, no. If I bought it, I own it and the manufacturer can fuck right off.
Gotta pay for the OS somehow. The previous system ended up with tons of unpatched out-of-support machines spreading malware.
Because 95% of them based their shit on Linux but refused to provide the shit available for the community to take over support.
Any OS with ads is malware.
I did, when I bought the device. And if the manufacturer does a good job, I’ll recommend them to friends and family and likely buy more of their products.
The FOSS community does most of the heavy lifting with security updates anyway. Most of these things are running Linux, so they’ve already helped themselves to that community’s work.
