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Comment by imoverclocked | Hacker News Reader

This pattern is pervasive. I also dislike needing an app and an internet connection for the most basic functionality with some purchased device. At some point, we need to own the things we buy and that line keeps getting pushed back further and further.

Anec-data: I purchased a cooking device for my parents in December and it has a single button to turn it off. The only way to use it is with an app which requires a login to the company's service. The device even has local bluetooth capabilities. You may be wondering, "What is this device supposed to do?" and the obvious answer is: "It's supposed to boil water." The real answer seems to be, "it collects usage data about customers boiling water."

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I'm assuming you are talking about a sous vide device.

This is one of the few (unrooted) smart devices I actually appreciate. You can easily configure it for a specific task (steak? chicken? brussels?), get push notifications when it's done and even turn off it's warm setting remotely if needed.

And given that most of the thing is immersed in boiling hot water, it makes sense to not put controls on the device itself.

And in two or three years, when that cloud service inevitably shuts down, you'll be stuck with a pot that doesn't heat water.

The app doesn't need the cloud for bluetooth usage or basic wifi usage (though "out of your house" usage likely uses their relay service). You would no longer get "recipe of the week" stuff, but that is a small loss.

The real danger is that eventually the app goes away due to not being maintained. Hopefully they release the API spec before then, but my specific device has already been reverse engineered at least.

The app will eventually stop working because of incompatible updates to the phone OS.

Yup, "smart" devices will require an accompanying phone of a similar age with the app already installed in case it was removed from the App/Play store -- if you want to keep using it much after 5 years.

Yeah, that is the danger I tried to allude to in my second paragraph.

I hope we do see phone/OS/store ecosystems that focus on longterm stability of features and UI. Keep devices repairable by end users, supply parts for the whole of the phone's lifespan.

Fair phone is trying to do this for phone hardware, and Framework is doing similar for laptops. We still need OS and store ecosystems.

It should be legally mandated to release either the firmware source, or at least the API and applicable keys, before discontinuing support for a device.

I'm reminded of the Wemo netcams my parents owned, which updated to remove a previous ability connect directly to the video stream in favor of pay-only cloud software, and the proceeded to cease support for that, leaving my parents with two completely useless bricks.

https://www.belkin.com/us/support-article?articleNum=316642

I recently got an Anova -- with touch controls, and it works great both with and without the app. The top is a big bigger to handle the screen and touch controls.

Making an immersion circulator app-only is likely a BOM-reducing measure, which is fine (given that active time is probably at most a few minutes like twice a day). And you can get smaller form factors too with app-only control (e.g. Ember Mug).

It’s not fine. I still use electrical appliances that are 10-50 years old. I’m pretty sure these “smart” devices apps won’t work in a decade (if that).

My Anova touchscreen frequently fails to work in service, I think because of the humidity, which seems like something reasonably foreseeable by the designers...

I like it, but now leave it pre-set to 135°F lest I set it elsewhere and then lose the ability to adjust it, so I think they dropped the ball on the design.

i'm glad my anova has both manual and bluetooth controls, because after the first couple of uses i simply default to manual for everything. personally i tihnk modern cellphones are remarkably clunky devices for anything other than reading books and gps. they aren't even very ergonomic as phones, they're annoying for web browsing compared to laptops, and they are definitely not satisfying to use as controls for physical devices.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks this

I guess I can see a push notification for a very slow cooking process, but most of the time if you use a smart device in a kitchen frequently, you're going to get things like uncooked chicken juices on it. Not ideal for a personal phone.

Mine cost a quarter of the app-based devices I've seen and the one difference is that I have to take a glance at a little table. I don't mind that.

And whether a device has controls doesn't matter with regards to hot water contact. It has to be properly sealed either way and capacitive buttons work fine for this (not worse than the low-quality buttons they'd use otherwise). The main feature you get with Bluetooth is another point of failure thanks to connection problems, at least that's my average experience with BT.

Not interesting data. The real reason is that it's easier to connect things through a central service. I sometimes email myself for the same reason.

This is true for things that are connected to the network anyway. It is not true for unconnected devices controlled by Bluetooth. The gratuitous app login is straightforwardly malign.

Speaking from personal experience, I am far more comfortable with a web interface than a BT interface. If I were hired to write code for an IoT kitchen thing I'd probably implement a web thing, rather than a BT thing. That would not be malicious on my part, just laziness (if you're being unkind), or pragmatism (if you're being kind).

Why did you buy that?

I have a similar device and was recommended the newer and upgraded version from someone I know. Given time pressure and other priorities at the time, I took the recommendation without much further investigation.

> I also dislike needing an app and an internet connection for the most basic functionality with some purchased device.

Yeah, my watch supports setting (and syncing) the time and timezones using bluetooth. But before you can do that, you must agree to the maker's ridiculous privacy policy which includes consenting to sending them all kinds of data that has fuck all to do with setting the time on a watch. Immediately uninstalled. So that feature is dead weight to me unless/until someone reverse engineers the watch.

This is true for most consumer tech (whether software or hardware) nowadays. The primary objective is to get "engagement" out of it. Any useful work the product might be doing is the bare minimum needed to convince the user to "engage" with the product.

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