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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I find it so annoying that Nest devices (thermostats, cameras, and security system) aren't directly accessible via my phone over my local network. Why do I have to transmit my requests from my phone to the cloud and then have it come back down to the device in my home? This means I can't connect during Nest outages or (much more frequently) when my internet is down.

Even when there are no outages, it still takes ~10 seconds every time I open up the Home app for it to populate any information.

By contrast, I can open the app for my Wyze cam and be seeing/hearing the live feed in ~5 seconds. (I still don't love the cloud-first aspect of the Wyze cam, but it was dirt cheap and that's the primary reason I got it. Nest products aren't cheap, so I expect better performance, not worse.)

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> Why do I have to transmit my requests from my phone to the cloud and then have it come back down to the device in my home?

Because otherwise you wouldn't be paying an advertising company to have access to the inside of your home.

Fair point! But by slowing everything down, they're constantly reminding me that they're the MITM on everything. I'd think it they could offer a smoother customer experience with direct device connectivity and periodic cloud check-ins that happen behind the scenes. They'd still be able to gather tons of data, but users would get a snappier app.

I have some LIFX lights and they seem to be like this too. The responsiveness of the app is brutal. Sometimes I swear the sliders for dimming are going out to the cloud and back. Have you ever used a high latency slider?

I don't know if I should call it the worst app I've ever used or the worst app I've ever used on a daily basis, but it's definitely one of the worst apps I've ever touched.

Yes. I would like to write an app that pulls images from my cameras and uses them for training data. As near as I can tell, the only way to do this is to sign up as a Google device access, and all that implies.

(If anyone knows of an alternative way, please let me know).

> Why do I have to transmit my requests from my phone to the cloud and then have it come back down to the device in my home?

Because if you could access it locally it wouldn't be in the cloud

But it's not in the cloud - the device is in my house; my phone is in my house.

Ahem - whoosh? I agree with you, only, you know, it's the cloud. All new things should be there whether it sane or not.

We still have awful authentication options on the LAN, so going through the cloud fixes this.

One advantage I like is you can put IoT things on a segregated network.

The reason is security. Like for some new wifi routers, you can't connect directly to it. This approach clearly has the downsides you mentioned but also makes it harder for hackers to mess with your thermostat.

That is a stupid reason. Put your smart devices behind a Tor Hidden Service, so that they're basically invisible to anyone but you, but still accessible from everywhere. Generate a keypair for every device you want to allow access from and you're safe from most credible threats.

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