I find this whole iot thing very frustrating as a consumer.
I'm assuming you always remember?
They don't have to do shit. They chose it themselves. IoT market is pretty much pure marketing/hype creation. Current solutions don't make any sense, and are pushed to people who don't understand it.
There are deeper problems here though. Current smartphone model doesn't make any sense either, but this is something even many techies are blind about. Like apps, third of which shouldn't exist in the first place, and another third should be OS-level components. Interoperability sucks because everyone is trying to make a lock-in business out of their small part in the solution.
But I'm just a grumpy techie myself. Until the world gets its shit together (i.e. never), I'll continue to build my smart home out of Raspberry Pis and DIY components, while also telling everyone to avoid anything that's done over cloud.
I am seriously thinking there might be a market for lobotomizing smart appliance. Niche market, but still.
The ecosystem is going to be huge, so focusing on larger companies, with classical appliance lines (fridge, toaster, TV), that open source their firmware makes sense.
Within a certain product line code gets reused often, so you could work with specific product lines.
Also it really depends on how far you want to go with this and what options the firmware gives you to work with.
its easier on the customer and developer for there to be a passwordless local protocol.
I think how the wireless Apple headphones pair is how all these iot devices should be paring with your smartphone. Then its a if you are near it you interact with it.
Very, very, few applications really require remote access vs proximity based access.
When bluetooth works, it works well. But the failures are very difficult to diagnose and address. Those are what the calls will be about and why they will be lengthy.
But i guess if there was a patch to WiFi which gave it a LAN connection only then that'd be cool.
The devices themselves should not need Internet connection, period.
Other than that, most every appliance you can get non internet options. In fact, internet options are rarer / premium items
See e.g. a laser cutter featured once on HN, that offloaded its basic computations to my butt, turning it into $2000-worth big paperweight if you lost your Internet connection.
I mean, I understand that people need to make money, but some of the business models today are so user-hostile that it's no longer funny.
Yep. Can't use my Vizio Smartcast TV without connecting it to the internet for 10 hours of updates. Can't use my Nexus 5 without connecting it to the internet to upload my identity to Google.