Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

I designed and built a wooden remote control[1] so I know a bit about why this is.

My iOS app asks the user for location permissions because without it the remote control app won't know when to attempt to connect when you walk in the door with your iPhone but your remote is sitting at home, waiting for you to hit it to turn on your lights or play music on your Sonos. If you hit the button and nothing happens, that's a horrible user experience!

I used to have location set to Always even though I don't store the location (and I'm explicit about that, even going so far as to open source the entire app ecosystem[2]) but then Apple pushed back and said that always having a location was against their ToS for remotes. I then switched to a geofence, which is still a location based permission but takes less battery life.

For Apple the tradeoff was not privacy but battery life. If I were to store your geofence information on my servers (which, ick) that would be OK as long as it was in teeny tiny text in my privacy policy. So while other remote control products are happy to take that information and sell it I decided to not double dip since you already pay once for the product. This is similar to my news reader which also has competitors that sell users' data. The tradeoff for me is that I earn a lot less than I theoretically could, but again, I don't double dip. Benefits of indie technology vs. venture-backed technology.

[1] Turn Touch: https://turntouch.com

[2] iOS source code: https://github.com/samuelclay/turntouch-ios

Hi!

You might be interested to know that the Turn Touch homepage starts playing audio as soon as it is opened. This was enough for me to close it and never come back, and I think this sentiment is reasonably widespread.

I'm genuinely curios about the reason some people decide to add audio (or video for that matter, but audio is way worse) on autoplay. Do you enjoy when web pages you visit do it? Did you see from some kind of metric that it increases your sales?

Yikes! It's part of a hidden video that shouldn't play until you explicitly open it. What's your browser/OS? I tested on Chrome, Safari, and FF on mac as well as iOS.

I also just added a muted attribute to the `video` tag so it should no longer do that even if I messed up the JS for some browser somewhere. I encourage you to try it once again to confirm.

Same here. Chrome on MacOS. Your device does look gorgeous though!

Also FF on Win 7.

Not only that, but the fake popup made me NOPE out of the site.

I'm not going to fight reading a bloody advert with an annoying "GIMMEE EMAIL" advert. That pattern needs to die in a fire.

I kinda agree in that I also dislike it. But I just disabled the exit intent pop up so you won’t see it again.

FF 64 on Linux. I tried again and now there is no autoplaying audio. Not sure how to check whether the hidden video has started though.

No issues here, tested on Chrome and FF (win 8.1)

For me the hidden video starts (hidden) when I open the page, so when I click 'Watch the video' it's already part way through.

Firefox 65.0 on MacOS 10.14.

This is an awesome product.

Have you ever seen anyone with nightstand or coffee table where they hollowed out a section for the remote to go in.

I like the idea of being able to pop it out and take it withe me, but 99% of the time I would want it in the exact same place so I would love if it could lie flush and be a part of nightstand.

I built a complementary product called the pedestal which does exactly this. You can either mount it on the wall (it has magnets to hold it in place) or place it on a nightstand (as I do) where it lives in the same place every time when I reach for it.

Wow... your answer makes my question sound like it was sponsored.

But you are awesome. I will be making an order.

I've been looking for a way to turn all the lights off in the house and shut off my kids iPad. I can do these things by going into apps on my phone, but when I'm wanting to do it I'm often REALLY exhausted and would kill for a 1 button solution.

I don't quite see how I can use this to shut off the iPad easily. But it definitely helps with the lights. And I think if I hook the house Wifi up to a smart switch I can basically turn the iPad off.

You can use NFC tags in a way such that a script is run when the device comes close to the tag. I gather you can thus do things like send an API call to turn off all the lights when you put your phone on your bedside table.

That's a great suggestion. I found this project doing exactly what you describe.

https://hackaday.com/2013/02/22/nfc-tags-control-your-homes-...

Any reason you don't support Android? This sounded like a perfect solution to have a physical button to control my smart lights, but then I realized I can't use it.

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