Anova just announced the planned obsolescence of their original connected immersion cookers. When my partner wanted one for Christmas 2016 it took all of my self-restraint to skip this product in favor of a “dumb” one, but even back then I was skeptical of the longevity of anything using on a proprietary phone app. Good on Anova for staying in business and keeping their products supported for this long, but lots of these devices will be prematurely sent to the landfill because they’ve lost one of their differentiating features.
I’m not all that eco-minded but I dislike this sort of wastefulness.
How about the one about there being no such thing as a free service?
Or what the S in IoT stands for?
(The A & R in IoT stand for Availability and Reliability)
Why on Earth do so many “smart” products demand that I install a phone app and give it access to my location? Why do they need an Internet connection and often fail to function when the manufacturer’s “cloud” experiences problems? Why does my dash cam need a subscription? Why do so many products eschew open standards and full local control?
What happens when these manufacturers go under? Get bought by Google another company and shut down? Or just randomly decide that my devices no longer serve a useful purpose for them and shut down the services they depend on?
I don’t want anyone monetizing data gleaned from the devices I need to live a modern existence. I don’t want anyone having that data at all. I want my “smart” devices to serve only me, to last until they physically break or are rendered obsolete by progress, and to not be dependent on subscriptions-as-a-monetization-decision — I’m happy to subscribe to services that incur ongoing expenses, and deliver commensurate value, but too many are design decisions to generate recurring revenue by gatekeeping functionality in The Cloud.
This is my journey in reducing The Cloud in my life. And whatever else strikes my fancy related to Home Automation, IoT, Self-Hosting, and whatnot.
