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Comment by sigmonsays | Hacker News Reader

the entire architecture is awful. The smart home has all these smart devices calling out to cloud APIs for even the most basic functionalities that could be performed locally.

The "Cloud" is used to turn on a light in the house. I'm not sure if they want to collect information but smart devices that operate locally have far less failure cases.

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You mean, I shouldn't be distributing my 'light switched on' and 'light switched' off events over a highly available kafka cluster hosted on another continent? What if I want to replay the entire history of my switch flicking?

Are there any companies or projects working on a completely local “smart home” hub? I suppose most companies are care more about sucking up our data and providing a “service” with a monthly bill than about providing useful hardware. It feels like there’s a huge gap between the best possible smart home product and what’s actually available.

This is what Nabu Casa is doing with home assistant. At the other extreme by size Apple’s HomeKit is local-first too and they play well together.

Home Assistant is the leader here. One of the largest projects on GitHub with a “local-first” philosophy. They have a cloud service for exposing your instance but you don’t have to use it.

I’ve been using it for years and it’s matured quite a bit recently. Combine with Zwave of ZigBee devices and the only thing you need internet for is voice assistant if you want it (Totally not required)

One of the best options is locally hosted Home Assistant. Local, private, and connects to an enormous number of devices and services.

https://hubitat.com/ is local. It's worked well for my house

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