The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing | Hacker News Reader

The Philips Hue ecosystem is collapsing

rachelbythebay.com

963 pointspicture707 comments

Recent and related:

Philips Hue will soon force users to create an account - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37594377 - Sept 2023 (314 comments)

Rachel nailed it, as usual. I was an early adapter and have a houseful of Hue stuff, but over the last year or so I've switched to buying Nanoleaf bulbs. Hue is a little nicer, but not enough to make their terrible app worth the hassle.

I've seen a few recommendations now for the Ikea Dirigera hub, so fine. I've ordered one. Assuming it works as expected, I'll migrate everything next week. So long, Philips. I liked your stuff, but why'd you have to get greedy? Was being twice the price of your competition not enough?

Govee are also very popular now, I haven't personally used any but I have a mix of Hue + a bunch of other stuff powered mostly through HA and it's always worked pretty flawlessly for me using their Hue bridge of course. Even the PC color sync works pretty well with not much latency considering it's a software implementation -> network -> bridge -> wireless to the lights. It's the most non-hacker-friendly "ambilight" setup I've ever used.

I have a Govee brand humidity sensor that works great. Bluetooth only (there are wifi models too iirc, Bluetooth was fine for my purpose), connects instantly & reliably, no account or other bs.

I haven’t gone in much for home automation so can’t speak to how well it integrates with anything else, but this thing at least works great.

I now have a couple of different app controllable LEDs. By far, the Hue app has been the best of the bunch. However, my app recently gave me the "Starting soon, you'll need to be signed in" notice. I am very unhappy with this, as everything I want my lights to do is working perfectly fine without even needing an account to be signed into.

From the moment I first saw the notice, I started wondering if I'll have to find a new app. But because "soon" has not arrived, I just have been ignoring it. I hope when "soon" arrives it will be a weekend so I have plenty of time to deal with it.

The BestBuy Insignia brand smart switches died years ago (they shut the clowd servers down and sent me gift cards for the purchase price, nice) but they keep working with HomeKit every day.

Hopefully I can just block my Hueshit at the router and they'll keep doing what they do, otherwise off to goodwill.

>clowd servers

it's like a portmanteau between clown + cloud, because most of these cloud things I swear are led by clowns. I like it a lot!!

I typod it, the spell checker fixed it, and then I thought the exact same thing, and went back and broke it again.

I'm claiming it and hereby releasing it into the public domain! :D

You need a PR for this. Someone start a repo. And while we’re at it, can we think of something better than enshitification? It just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well at all.

I've always been partial for "slumping into the melt" - a term from forging metal and glass. Everything becomes a even bland useless but barely working mix in the crucible of modern finance.

enshitification is just so onomatopoeically pleasing though. it's also like one of those fun German words, but in English.

It's similar to one of those George Carlin bits where putting a curse word in the middle of an ordinary word changes the power of the word. incredible -> infuckingcredible absolutely -> absofuckinglutely

I just don't know what enification means.

In German it would be Verscheißigung?

There is already a german word for it, it's called "Verschlimbesserung". Which you could translate to "Improving but making it worse", sounds better in german so. :)

Yeah, but that has no cussword component.

Verschlimmbesserung could be translated as imworsement maybe?

Tom Scott did a video about this a few years ago.

https://youtu.be/dt22yWYX64w

I think this shows the generational gap between the two of us. I didn't even know what a Tom Scott was.

> And while we’re at it, can we think of something better than enshitification? It just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well at all.

I think a term that doesn't slide off the tongue actually captures some of the feeling of what enshitification is.

"Why yes, our silver-haired CEO enshittified the product with a data-mining clowd service!"

I was also very unhappy to see that notice. However, If you tap “learn more”, it sounds like creating an account is optional. You’ll only need an account to opt-in to certain features, like controlling your lights when away from home, etc.

Tapping the "learn more" feels like such an adult thing to do rather than just bitching about it online without reading any of the details first.

I use the Ikea lights and bridge, although mine is a few years old at this point. Everything just works and I've maybe had 1 issue in just over 4 years. Easily integrates with either Google Home or HomeKit or HA. My only complaint is (my) bridge needs hardwire ethernet access and each bridge only supports 5 devices. I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick. Not a big deal though as I never used it anyway, but having the option was nice.

Wait, please define "device" as used in that sentence. Not counting bulbs, right?

Any light you want to independently control is a device. So yes, each bulb is a device. But that was with the TRADFRI, which it seems they don't sell anymore. It looks like the DIRIGERA supports up to 100 devices though, so probably nothing to worry about. Feels like I probably bought the first gen of their smart products.

> each bridge only supports 5 devices.

I still have one of the original hubs and I definitely have more than 5 devices (light bulbs and outlets) working without problem.

> I bought one of the wireless physical switches which seemed like it would come in handy, but the battery died pretty quick

I have at least 3 physical switches in use and they’ve lasted at least 2 years so far.

I have about four or more different products, including Hue, Ikea, Mirabella Genio.

So far Genio is cheaper and works at least as well as the rest.

Matter makes it a lot easier to mix and match products from different ecosystems. You can get 3 A19 nanoleaf RGB blubs that support Matter over Thread for the price of one Hue RGB A19. The Hue might be better but I doubt its 3 times better (I have a bunch of Hue lights and no nanoleafs yet).

I'll be moving to matter blubs (whatever brand strikes the best balance between price and quality) in the future and only using Hue bulbs when its necessary for features that aren't supported with Matter (like Hue Sync).

I just bought Nanoleaf bulbs and they just don’t get bright enough. Then I have issues where there’s always 2 or 3 bulbs out of 6 that don’t respond and they’re all next to HomePods and routers etc…I really hate that Philips went down this route because so far they definitely seem to have the better product.

BTW, the firmware update from the last week or so made a world of difference in the stability.

I do wish they were brighter.

Philips hasn’t bern involved since the spin-off in 2016, other than Signify being allowed to sell under their name.

I’ve had great experience with the IKEA stuff. I even still have the old Tradfri hub. I haven’t really had any make problems with it, despite the reputation it has received.

I have it connected to Homekit via an Apple TV.

My main complaint is how big their outlets are.

My first setup was for my apartment which did not have any overhead lights or a switched outlet. Ikea's came with a remote and you could use it hubless (just pair directly to up to 10 bulbs). No internet needed and it actually never broke for the 3 years I needed it.

have you used the nanoleaf api? I just want to be able to control my lights from my terminal and I'm not smart enough at hacking to get hue to work

I have used the Zigbee2mqtt quite well with Hue and a USB dongle: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/

When Ikea came out with smart home stuff, I bet that they would get it right, or at least not as bad as the others (I previously suffered through the enshitification of Samsung's SmartThings). In my experience their stuff has been flimsy and not sure trustworthy. It at least works without an app, so far, but I've not been able to regain any enthusiasm for the promise of home automation

Unfortunately, this. I have expected more from Ikea, but I guess they have to keep the prices low. :/

i don't know why you'd expect Ikea to not be flimsy and cheap -- that's the point.

Well, my entire apartment is mostly IKEA stuff.

And, thinking about it now, sadly you're probably right! Especially their newer stuff.

When was SmartThings good? I missed that. The only thing I use it for is an oven that, even though it is connected to the internet, can't manage to update the time when daylight savings time changes. To get the oven to update the time, you have to open the app, find the oven, go to Settings, turn OFF the "automatic time sync" option and then turn it back on again. Every 6 months.

I performed this ritual last weekend, and followed up by filing a bug report about what a shitshow the whole thing was from the feedback option in the app. I got a very nice message back from Samsung telling me my message had come to the wrong place and that I should do something different if I wanted to give feedback about the app. FFS.

I've completely replaced all my Hue lights with Lutron Casetas. They work so much better than individual light bulbs talking to the bridge. I use Apple Home which is mostly meh, but feels more robust than Hue or Google Home.

I have nearly all of our light switches on Casetas (except for things like bathroom and closets, where we're not sitting/lying down or care about dim levels).

However... in some rooms (office and board game room), I do like having the option for cool white during the day, and warm white at night. So I like having Hues there.

So, while Casetas are good for automating a single color, you still need bulb-level automation for anything involving multiple colors.

As an electronics guy with both backend and frontend programming experience for me there are three routes when it comes to my home infrastructure:

1. Buy something dumb, non-smart, non-cloud

2. Build it myself

3. Buy something that can be hacked and used with my own infrastructure

The problem isn't even their infrastructure, it is that they decide when they want to change it. Even if it was all good faith changes, that could be a reliability issue and force me to dedicate time to the issue on their whim. I don't like that. If I run such things myself I can decide myself when to update and how much time I want to invest when (provided the system is decoupled from the public internet).

And this point isn't even about any single company trading the good will of their customers bit by bit — it is just about me not having to jump when their service changes or ends for whatever reason (and there are many).

I do the same. Everything “smart” that I need I build myself. Just buy a few esp32 or arduinos and write it up or use it with node red.

It’s not hard if you know a little programming and electronics.

I assume that any smart devices that I can buy are just money machines, made to spy on me, or both.

> they decide when they want to change it

Not only when, but the changes they make are almost universally a rewriting of the assumptions at time of purchase, where you lose.

Nothing wrong with buying smart equipment, as long as it's local first using common protocols like generic Zigbee. That way you don't NEED to use the manufacturers hubs and interfaces and you substitute out for your own controller like Homeassistant or a third party Hub.

Indeed. Buy devices that comply with standards.

It's a little like buying some networking device that suppports only proprietary protocols and then complain it doesn't support TCP/IP.

My go to configuration is IKEA Trådfri + Home Assistant.

A number 4. would be: Buy from an established lighting company that publishes compatibility tests. It may not have all the bells and whistles but focuses on doing one thing right, which is to switch a light. My Lutron’s have never needed a debug since install and I get all the convenience and forget about it. I think a lot of people get into home automation to constantly tweak stuff. If that is what tickles them sure. For me, like anything automated, I want it to work in the background and provide some quality of life improvements and never have to think about it again.

I think I have one voice-activated switch that replaced X10 in a room lacking wiring for a convenient regular light switch, a low temp alarm, and a camera/temp sensor I put together myself.

I understand there are people who like to fiddle with this stuff but mostly I don’t get the attraction.

The trust has been broken in electronics/technology products in general

There is very little loyalty to the customer from the manufacturers, and so customers are now weary and loosing their loyalty for brands in the way consumers traditionally did.

My only remaining smart device is an off brand smart bulb on my front porch. It is set up to turn on at 6PM and off at 6AM. It disconnected from my network years ago, but has kept working great nonetheless. I think of it like a Mars probe going about its business. :-)

When mine disconnected from the network I discovered it was flashing nonstop red, green, and blue. I'm surprised the neighbors didn't come over and complain

Exactly. I violated this rule once when I bought a Nest thermostat because it was elegantly designed (this was pre-Google). Then Nest started forcing random updates that not only bricked the device a couple of times (fortunately not permanently) but also changed the UI so that at random times when I wanted to fiddle with a setting I had to relearn how to work the thing.

Finally I got smart and changed my wifi password so the thermostat couldn't talk to the Internet any more, at which point I had a very elegant, unconnected thermostat that eventually became unreliable because it couldn't draw enough current from my two-wire system to keep itself reliably charged up. I tossed it in the recycle bin and bought a $25 dumb thermostat to replace it and I couldn't be happier.

Some general notes to the idiots in C-suites at every company making home automation devices:

1. I don't work for you.

2. You have competitors.

3. You do not get to make demands on my time to re-learn your UI, download software updates, advertise things to me, or sign new EULAs whenever you so desire. I have a life and it doesn't revolve around your company.

4. You do not get to spy on me with your device and sell information about my personal habits.

5. You do not get to use your cloud connectivity to force me into a recurring payment plan just to continue to use your device.

6. If you disagree with any of the above, I would ask that you carefully reread (1) and (2). Misbehavior on your part will result in your product being thrown in the trash, no further purchases from me, and my social network being immediately warned to avoid your company like the plague.

I only have three in the home office. Do ypu know how the 3rd party clients are affected with the recent changes?

> I was an early adapter

I see what you did there.

Honestly I found the post and her attitude kinda annoying.

She dismisses Home Assistant for silly reasons, but then fully acknowledges that the IKEA thing doesn't actually work properly with the Hue kit, and worries that IKEA is going to pull some garbage in the future anyway.

It's a shame that solutions like openHAB and Home Assistant aren't dead-simple for the average person to set up, and they have a bunch of usability issues. But if you're the kind of person who is sick of companies enshittifying the things you've already bought and were happy with, you have to actually own the experience, and openHAB or HA is the only way to do that.

I've been running openHAB for 3+ years now, and while it hasn't been perfect, it does what I want and need, and I never worry about some company updating things and breaking my experience. I update when I want to, and can roll it back it the update causes problems.

I hadn’t heard of Nanoleaf, so I checked out their site. Immediately a GDPR notice filled my screen, which is no surprise, but they make it pretty hard to opt out. Most importantly, though, it states that they share _identifiable_ data with TikTok. I think I’ll be avoiding that brand.

> We use TikTok Ads to promote our products and services in various countries.TikTok shares information with advertisers and third-party measurement companies to show how many and which users of the Platform have viewed or clicked on an advertisement. If you use the TikTok Lite version of TikTok, information is shared with advertising networks to display personalized advertisements to you on the TikTok Lite app and elsewhere online. TikTok stores and processes data in accordance with their privacy policy.

> Data is Anonymised: No > Data Storage Locations: United States and Canada > Data Usage Purposes: Marketing

> Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can't access your stuff.

Maybe it's good news? To me it sounds as illegal as a car manufacturer requiring you to use Shell vpower in order for you to not void the warranty, and doing so after you bought the car.

Maybe the EU could then deal with this and ask the important question: Are they even allowed to link the functionality of IoT devices to an online account?

My reason for buying all Phillips was that their system was relatively open, that the gateway could be accessed and controlled via HTTP and put behind a firewall without access to and from the internet. And the ability to use 3rd party apps.

I've moved over to using Zigbee2MQTT together with a Zigbee USB 3.0 Dongle and all controlled from a custom Python based server on a Raspberry Pi, which made me lose all the access via the apps (I'm not into Home Assistant), but it's now all automated and controllable via dimmers and other events so that in my case the Phillips gateway has become obsolete.

But it was a great entry into the ecosystem, just because it was simply usable via HTTP, which allowed the best of both worlds: the apps and the ability to tinker with it all. The only thing which was missing was the real-time access to events.

Sad to see that they are turning their back on us, but let's hope that the EU notices and creates some new laws, even if it's in 10 years.

> Zigbee USB 3.0 Dongle

Which one do you use?

Same one

Not the GP, but I've been tinkering with HA on a Pi4 and use a Sonoff one on a long USB cable (per the manufacturer's recommendation to avoid interference from the Pi). It's the EZSP based one, https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B0B6P22YJC

They do another one on a different chipset too; the EZSP one is the newer hotness, and so far unlike the older model, there's no firmware update to flash.

Get one with a big external antenna and use a 30…50 cm USB extender cable to distance it from other 2.4Ghz RF sources.

https://sonoff.tech/product/gateway-and-sensors/sonoff-zigbe...

I use a "SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZigBee 3.x.0 TI CC2652P + CP2102N Coordinator" with a long USB cable.

As user cricalix points out, there's also a version with an EFR32MG21, I'm not sure how they compare nowadays, see discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/discussions/14261

I am using the same setup: sonoff zigbee plus dongle + zigbee2mqtt + home assistant.

Fully local solution with no 3rd party clouds, EULAs, proprietary hubs or propruetary apps or restrictions. Compatible with almost any zigbee device. A subset of tested and well-known devices is listed at their website https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/supported-devices/.

Recommending to everyone. It can be set up as 3 docker containers (zigbee2mqtt, mosquitto, home assistant), for example in docker compose. Or there are also ready-made images of Home Assistant with Supervisor GUI management for people not wanting to fiddle with that manually.

Node-Red is another great addon to the setup if you want to configure automations graphically by joining nodes together. Far more powerful than any proprietary solutions.

I use zigbee2mqtt, home assistant and nodered all installed on a vm. I have been running this for years. I also use DIYhue - which will take the homeassistant/z2m bulbs (and homebrew LEDS) and present them to Alexa in a friendly way (as hue controlled lights).

"What can you do about it? Before you say "Home Assistant", let me stop you right there."

No let me stop you right there. All the good Hue stuff works with Zigbee so you can (and should) totally just run your own hub and bypass all of this; yes with home assistant!

That's really the best solution. You can just control the lights directly how you see fit without even talking to Phillips.

Can you? A relative was cleaning out some of their stuff and gave me some Philips Hue lightbulbs, but no hub. I have a Home Assistant setup with a number of Zigbee devices, but I had never found anyway to pair them direction via Zigbee, everything I saw required the hub. If there is a way, I'd like to hear it, I've just been using them as regular lightbulbs...

Power off the bulb. Turn your zigbee hub into pairing mode (it may always be in pairing mode). Turn on bulb. Should autopair in 30 secs or less.

My hue bulbs pair so aggressively to my zigbee hub that I have to block pairing on it to get new ones on the hue hub!

They may already be paired and you just never realized.

Side comment, I have some ZWave bulbs and they pair the same way.

I have no experience from Hue lights, but at least Ikea bulbs need to go to pairing mode if they were previously paired to something. Without it they cannot pair to new hub. With Ikea lights you get them into pairing mode by flicking the lights on and off 10 times.

I've had to force my Hue bulb into zigbee pairing mode by holding a Hue dimmer switch very close, then pressing and holding the on and off buttons until the light starts to flash and stops flashing, then releasing the on/off buttons.

Not reliably. There are people whose setup more or less works and they’re super loud about how everyone is wrong about the bugs, but a quick google will show you a giant army of people who have issues with it.

I may not know enough about the situation but I bought a set of bulbs a few months ago and they pretty much instantly connected to my Zigbee router connected to Home Assistant. Haven’t had any problems with them since (dimming & changing color temp).

I have been running Hue lights over zigbee and zigbee2mqtt/homeassistant for years. Get the right usb dongle and it just works.

See what I mean?

Of course you can. Use Zigbee2MQTT and buy one of the supported adapters (don’t get IKEA) and all your Zigbee devices will work. No cloud needed: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/

this is a very silly comment.

yes they are zigbee, yes they work better with the Hue Hub (e.g. colour transitions). Phillips is significantly reducing the usability and value of their own products with this shitty decision.

I don't like home assistant. Everything is based off state changes which is just so stupid.

Ie instead of sending a "home_button_clicked" event, it has to work with: button_click=none -> button_click=home -> delay() -> button_click=none. Just a ridiculous architecture.

Obvious thing is to make it completely event based where certain events change state, ie discrete event=home_button_clicked which has the side-effect of setting event_last_button_clicked when that event is triggered.

They've done it completely the wrong way around and it annoys the hecky out of me.

Can someone explain the Home Assistant anecdote regarding JS and curl | sudo sh? Does the author mean Home Assistant isn't secure? Or that there's some issue with the front end of it? Or something else?

Because imo... that is the answer. We have seen so many stupid closed ecosystems of home automation stuff come and go, I dunno why you'd mess with anything else at this point. In fact I just got another email reminder that Google is turning off the old Works with Nest stack. Remember Nest? Yeah...

This right here is like a second-order or third-order effect of the layoffs last year. Tech companies are shuttering useful consumer products because their profit margins just aren't high enough for today's high interest environment

Current interest rates are moderate, and hopefully are the new normal if our society is to have any future. The past two decades have been extremely low rates. High is like 10-15%.

It’s high for any business that has been coasting through the cheap money era of the last 10 years

I'm also curious about the Home Assistant anecdote. It seems like there might be some security or reliability concerns, but I'd like more information to understand the context better.

It's confusing because the OP is referring to a pipe to bash method as if it's a recommended install method, which I can't seem to find anywhere on the HA installation page.

Yes there are security concerns with any home automation system, but if you run HA locally and only access it via a VPN like Tailscale you're probably safer than if you used any of the big name cloud first smart home providers. Even if you access it over the Nabu Casa site, because everything is ostensibly Local first your attack surface is always going to be quite minimal.

The author is referring to the officially recommended way to install home-assistant on a Linux box, which is just curl-ing and running an install script as root.

I totally get how that's off-putting, but the real recommended way to run home assistant is to install Home Assistant OS on dedicated hardware. Which also can be off-putting.

Either way, it's my favourite software that I regularly interact with (unless you count Linux).

This. This is what she meant. But the problem is, if you really like home automation and don't want to spend an arm and a leg buying just one spec, you'll have problems and will have to use multiple hubs.

I just run it in a docker container along with zwave-js, which is also in a docker container.

My only issue with running HA with docker is when I restart the machine, the docker container starts before my ZigBee dongle shows up in /dev/, which means all ZigBee devices are not accessible until I restarted the container. I ended up patching the docker unit file to add 2 minutes delay, but the patch will be reverted next time docker updated. I wonder if there is a better way to fix this.

Depending on your setup, you might be able to use docker-compose with depends on and a health check to start your containers in an order and to await the device availability.

I don't think that's really fair - the recommended way to run Home Assistant is to run HA OS (on a VM or dedicated machine, like a Raspberry Pi), or to run it in a Docker container.

The "Supervised" installation (i.e. installing Home Assistant on top of an existing Linux install) is doable, but not preferred.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

Iirc they explicitly say don’t / recommend against it. I mean I still did but it definitely isn’t the way most people will install it at all

We tried, but the community wanted to keep the installation method, so we kept it around.

personally i did it because i like my servers to be debian & i wanted it to match all the other VMs i have running

so thanks for keeping it around :)

Meanwhile on Windows, everyone gives admin rights to random installers without batting an eye.

"just give us root on your system" install scripts like that are a security thing, yes.

I think the issue is more the attitude towards security and system stability that is implied by such installation methods, which is apaprently endemic to the entire "JS ecosystem". That attitude being "who cares about security or stability?"

When It's my system and I don't want to mess with it, just set stuff up and have it run trouble free and do the things I want (and only I want), then I do care about such things and agree that JS has no place other than sacrificial toy boxes that get insulated from "real" computing like they was a modem with its phone number posted at the payphones by the 2600 meetup.

The idea is that you give it root on a VM or on a docker container.

You don't give it root on your desktop linux system you do all your sensitive stuff on of course. That makes zero sense. Home assistant really runs great even on a cheap raspberry pi if you don't have a VM- or dockerserver.

thus "sacrificial toy boxes"

also, your faith in "VM" insulation appaears greater than mine. if i dont trust a VM i dont trust the host running the VM.

others have different opinions and that's ok. my systems run to my standards, however quirky they may be. im stating opinion here, not attempting to inscribe Sysadmin Commandments. them's written on the wall of the bathroom stall.

edit: just for reference, the last cpu i could say i trusted was before speculative execution was a feature. since then its more about risk mitigation. i'm not paranoid, there's people worse than me, and they're nuts. I'm just cautious and lazy.

If you don’t trust your hypervisor, buy a pi or cheap nuc, but also your hypervisor being 0day’d is probably far less likely than one of the thousands of apps in $PATH being compromised or malicious.

I understand not fully trusting docker, you have to trust several levels of kernel features and configuration, plus it shits all over your firewall like it owns the place.

Real virtualization is a bit more airtight, though. There have been some escape exploits but they all abused drivers that you wouldn't use heedless (shared folders, VGA, PCIe passthrough), not the virtualization layer. But that's a distinction without a different, really, so good on you for being careful!

Home assistant isn't malware, it's a major open source project that is well understood.

This isn't some binary you downloaded from a Russian forum. VM isolation is more than enough.

If it's so trustworthy, why do you even need a VM?

Because it is a long running process, and it has plugins. Amd because both the container and the VM are premade, you don't even have to install, you just run them.

You can extend the container image with your own Dockerfile.

The problem then becomes maintaining it - backing up the config, debugging errors, etc. I ran Home Assistant for a while with their docker method on an otherwise stable server. One day it just shit the bed out of the blue. I wasn't going to spend the time digging into its own bespoke Linux userland to figure out how to figure out what was wrong, and I wasn't going to pave over it and spend the time redoing my meager config. In my book, software that is going to be relied upon gets installed through a distro's package manager, and last time I checked Home Assistant's maintainers are actively opposed to that.

It's nonsense. This is not even how you install home assistant.

They provide a pretty locked down image that also loads a ton of plugins in dockers. It's nice and well designed. And you don't have to expose it to the internet if you don't have to.

The installation described is legacy and only supported for historical purposes.

I agree that Hue has totally gone down the toilet but the criticism of Home Assistant isn't justified. And if you go for the Ikea one as recommended in the article, it's just going to be a matter of time until their shareholders will want to see those sweet recurring bucks too. You need a truly open ecosystem to avoid that from happening.

Ikea is at least privately owned - Philips is not. One could hope that they stay the course.

Yes but with open software and hardware you don't have to hope.

Companies are always going to want more and enshittification is pretty much inevitable.

The reason Ikea isn't in such a hurry because their Tradfri range is a very minor part of their business whereas for Signify (not Philips! They sold it years ago) Hue is their bread and butter product.

Probably a misguided idea of security. There is nothing wrong with JS itself, in fact, as far as languages go, it is pretty secure due to the attention it gets by being what runs in web browsers.

As for "curl | sudo sh", yeah it looks scary, but it is not worse than downloading a .deb and then doing "sudo dpkg -i your.deb", or installing any downloaded binary on your machine for that matter. You may say something about signatures, but often, the public key you have to trust is on the same website you downloaded the .deb. In all these cases, TLS is the only thing protecting you. Going through a file you don't audit doesn't change anything, and in practice, almost no one does the audit, and few linux boxes have AV scanners.

Don't trust it? Run it a VM, container, or dedicated hardware, this is actually what they are suggesting.

Not OP, but the HA ownership experience is … rough at best. If what you want is something that Just Works, HA is not for you.

Can someone explain to me what this ecosystem is and the appeal of it?

I have nothing automated in my life, that I know of? I don't have a garage; the door to the house has a key; the lights I turn on with a switch; no Alexa, don't use Siri... I am not exactly opposed to automation, but I am hesitant to share even more demographic data to cloud services.

I like the idea of local home automation. “Siri, make the bathroom lights dark blue”

Problem is, it comes with a ton of headaches.

The cloud is a problem, as you noted, but also a bunch of fiddily, unreliable software, firmware updates that go haywire, and apps that are tied to iOS and will stop working with my physically installed home hardware if the manufacturer ever stops treading water and fails to update for the latest breaking iOS update.

Home automation could be simple, reliable, and future-proof. It’s really not, though.

I'm not so sure it can be simple, reliable, and future proof, at least not in the consumer space.

Everyone is chasing the lowest price, and it has to compete with existing solutions that are cheap, like just putting a filter on a white bulb, or installing a dimmer switch. What these products are offering is convenience, but not fundamentally new life experiences. So they can't charge a lot.

Meanwhile, they have to interact with an absolutely enourmous range of interfaces. The wi-fi router, the phone, the electric service itself, etc. And the user has high expectations for ease of use (after all, it is a light bulb, it should be simple!) while needing good security (it is your home after all, if you can't be safe in your home then where can you be safe?)

A simple experience with a wide range of interfaces at low cost has almost never been successfully done. Even Apple can't do it; they offer ease of use, but in a limited ecosystem and at a premium price.

So these products are fundamentally flawed and they probably can never be fixed. This industry is fundamentally not viable until someone comes along and solves the interface issue or until people accept paying a lot of money for these kinds of things, and even in that case it would probably be a reseller performing a home install then providing API access to these services, which is only one step away from home-as-a-service.

And I personally do not think I could tolerate a home-as-a-service. But many young people or students might like that just fine.

> I'm not so sure it can be simple, reliable, and future proof, at least not in the consumer space.

Depending on your definition of future it's very possible. Find some devices classified as "Local Push" or "Local Polling" https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2016/02/12/classifying-th.... Make a VLAN with no internet access in your router and put them (and HA) on it. Never update the firmware (why would you, they work don't they?), connect them to HA and pin the version of it and your plug-ins. Don't let the devices talk directly to HA if you're extra paranoid.

Update at your leisure or never.

I've bought a bunch of stuff from these guys: https://athom.tech/

Their model is shipping ESP devices flashed with open source firmwares. They still go on their own firewalled wifi network, but this is about as future-proof as I can imagine: the software is open source, the updates can be run locally, the parts they're made of are actually pretty simple PCBs you could get a fab run of your own done if you wanted to.

In terms of "future" proofing, everything I've installed I've been putting in accessible junction boxes well labelled - electricity isn't going to change, so as long as it fits in a box, I'll always have the option to replace the hardware (if you have light switches with a neutral wire then you're basically set).

I wouldn't say "simple" per se but that's really more on the "you need a box running some type of home automation stuff". I suspect simple enough for the consumer would be something which came with it's own wifi AP and pre-configured mesh routers so the IoT network would start out intrinsically separated.

Right, and then have local services interacting with no cloud support, or phone integration.

But this is absolutely not "consumer" by any means. If my grandmother can't do it, you failed the simplicity test. This is exactly why we end up with cloud services for everything. Because real-world integration with the entire fleet of possibilities for consumer interaction is by definition an open-ended problem that can never be finished.

> Right, and then have local services interacting with no cloud support, or phone integration.

Huh? I have the Homeassiant app on my phone and I proxy the web interface to a VPC so it's accessible to me everywhere.

This was never intended to be a solution for your grandpa. This is a solution for nerds who want to build a future proof setup with consumer equipment (Phillips smart bulbs vs. commercial lighting like https://www.crestronlighting.com/)

If you don't like having "the big light" on then colour changing and dimmable lights are great. A lot of people don't feel qualified to install actual dimmer switches.

I only set mine to warm, cold and purple/blue but I don't have room for three lamps.

Stuff like the sunrise timer, switching lights on when you're on holiday, and out of home control are just gimmicks though.

The lights in my house turn on and off with the rhythm of our lives. We don’t think about turning a light on or off. They do that by themselves. My home knows when the dishwasher is done. My home can silence alerts if I’m on a zoom call. My home knows if the air quality is low and doesn’t turn on the ventilator fan.

Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.

I like having an app for my lights. Getting a little dark during a video call? Just turn the lights on without missing a beat. Better than the awkward "I'll be riiight back" that wastes 10 people's time.

(As for automatically turning on lights, that is also good. I have two receptacles outdoors that aren't on a switched circuit. Thanks to the magic of smart lights, they are now off during the day.)

And in my house the primary lights we use are lamps, so I can just shutdown or adjust the house/each room/lamp easily.

Maybe this is what I'm missing—opening an app is far more fiddly to me than standing up, flipping a switch, and sitting back down. I have to get my phone out, open it, hope face ID works (you mentioned it was dark), enter my code if not, find the app, click the app, wait for it to load, find the right button...

Do other people not struggle with apps the way I do?

I don't generally find those interactions to be a struggle, but it's still 10x easier and faster to get up and turn on the light using the old-fashioned switch.

4 ways to avoid an app

- schedule

- motion sensing

- voice

- routines / iftt (if it's a cloudy day, and zoom is open, then set brightness to x, maybe even open the shades)

- light switch

> - motion sensing

> - voice

But we already solved that with "Clap on!" :D

10 years ago my young child had fairy lights hung up in her room. They were really pretty and not too bright. However she didn't really have a way to turn them on/off without unplugging them. So, I remembered the "Clap on!" device from years ago and thought it would be the perfect solution.

It turns out that they are hard to find and very expensive ($30) for what they are. Even if you can find them it's hard to tell if its an original unit or some super cheap knockoff that might burn your house down. :(

Yes, "Clap on" is a valid competitor; it's not great in a room/house with multiple lights / rooms.

Motion sensing can be solved with Passive Infrared sensing light switches, it works great for my laundry, closets, and pantry.

Android and iOS both have the ability to have smart home controls in the notification shade/control center. Both also allow them to be used when the device is locked.

I have a battery-powered switch on my desk, so that avoids the need to use an app. Otherwise, I have my HA dashboard pinned in Chrome, so it's always one click away. And, you can have widgets on your phone's lock screen. I also don't like playing with my phone and don't use those.

If you don't need 'em or like the idea, don't spend $75 per switch. I got into smart lights because my apartment was apparently wired by a madman; the switch for my desk lights are right outside the bathroom. (Different circuit though!) I was very tired of walking that far to turn them on and off. I then replaced every other switch the week after, and have no regrets whatsoever, except maybe not having white tint adjustment. (I just have regular old LED bulbs. The switches are smart, not the bulbs.)

Once I was fully invested, I got a wall mount remote control that fits into a dual-gang faceplate (but only needs a single gang box), so I can control all of my lights when arriving or leaving. Very convenient.

Like others, I agree that automations are also nice. I have two fixtures outside that are unswitched. They turn on at sunset and off at sunrise now. No wasted electricity trying to overpower the sun. (Those are smart bulbs, of course.)

I'd do it from my computer instead of a phone.

But aside from that, do you have issues with Face ID in the dark? For me it works in pitch darkness. It sends out some laser light when scanning your face and hopefully not frying your eyes.

I have Android, not iPhone.

Ah, sorry. Thought Face ID specifically referred to the Apple feature.

I'm in the same boat as you (though generally not in the context of home automation and things) and I've also wondered the same thing. Using an app is just about the worst way I can interface with things and is only useful when it's the only possible way, like when I'm out and about.

One assumption I've made is that people just have much better and responsive phones than I do: I regularly wait 2-4 seconds for even the simplest things to happen on mine and it's overall a terrible experience. Overall I would say most phones I've had were like this at some point in their lifetime (often the majority of the lifetime), including a latest model Samsung phone that arguably was ahead of most available phones at the time.

I'm not sure what to think: I think it's just a matter of being used to a certain way of interacting with things in the end. Nothing's been able to replace a computer program for me, whether it be CLI, TUI or GUI.

As for home automation with apps vs. traditional switches and stuff I've always assumed that most of the stuff is done for coolness sake and because it's fun. Certainly what draws me to some of these things (though I haven't pulled the trigger on any of it) is that I could actually interface with the rest of the world from my computer, which I just think is a fun idea.

I think you could probably just skip the awkward “I’ll be riiight back” stand up, flip the light switch and carry on. I mean unless the light switch is in another room you’d still hear whatever is going on and unless you are literally running the meeting I struggle to imagine what the purpose of announcing your action is.

Maybe I’ve become a crusty old man, in years gone by I would have thought that people would notice me getting up and wonder where I was going. Now though, I’ve realized that no one is really paying that much attention to anyone else, even if someone were curious about why you walked away for a moment, the room getting brighter and you sitting back down doesn’t require a brain surgeon to piece together what happened.

Once you remove the completely voluntary awkward part of that video call, fiddling with an app and flipping a switch are on a lot more equal footing.

Good lighting is a luxury for sure but can definitely get complicated to control properly with just switches. The other thing is, once you’re in that ecosystem, you fiddle a lot at the beginning and then you don’t. My lights get blue and bright during the day and get warmer into the evening and since I work in the living room, it’s nice to have the two setups together.

When it works, it just feels good but certainly isn’t a necessity. And of course that’s just lights. I used to have my hvac system integrated into HomeKit too and again, it was nice being able to control the thermostat in my kids room without having to go in. More recently I’ve had a neighbor that smokes a lot of weed and something about the closets being badly insulated is letting in all his smoke in my daughter’s room. Tried talking to the guy and nothing happened. Luckily, his smoking schedule is super precise and I was able to set timers for my kids air purifier to go off at his exact smoking time for 1 hour. It’s been 3 months since I’ve seen particulate matter go above 30ug/m^2…it used to get as high as 180!

Being a renter means I’m only halfway into the automation game but I gotta say, given the right product and platform I’m all in. And if something doesn’t work right then it’s time to reverse engineer it and make it behave.

Holy crap how big is your home office that turning in a light is an side quest?

The other thing is that it means you can fix light switches which are in awkward places. I went to a lot of effort moving a couple of light switches in my house before I started wiring them all for ESPHome-based control...and me and my wife realized that actually, most of the light switches we're unhappy about can just be left alone since automation can make them way more useful (a simple example is just having the garage lights turn on when the garage door opens - makes coming home at night with a baby a lot easier, and also means you don't forget to turn them off).

Indeed! I have three lights in my backyard on three different circuits. Each one has a caseta dimmer but I linked them together with some scripting so no matter how you change one - switch, app, whatever, they all react in unison.

I'd rather just change the wiring and fit a run-on timer on the light.

This is a trivial wiring change, and a run-on timer from a local hardware or electrical store from a reputable brand is $25.

I understand small mains wiring jobs like this probably beyond some peoples ability or desire, but the benifits are:

One off up front cost

Probably never fail

No possibility of the product vendor having any impact on the products ever, other than the possibility of a product recall due to safety.

> Automation is not about having an app for your lights, it’s about not having to think of trivial stuff like turning on a light.

I have lived in America my entire life, a relatively comfortable life, and this sentence makes me feel extremely alienated from first world culture.

strong agree here man. I like to think controlling my living environment being a primary function of life

just like growing your own barley, amiright?

What about what they described makes you think they’re not in control? It’s the same principle as a mercury switch thermostat; figure out what you want the system to do and then automate it so you don’t have to constantly screw with it.

Well technically Amazon/Google/Philips/whoever is in charge of turning on the lights. You just happen to be sending a message that you want your lights turned on, but next week they might ask for a little more personal information or they won’t turn on the lights.

It’s creepy af

Seems like you missed the part where people run these offline. Don’t be so helpless.

Hence for example using a clip lead on the bare terminals to turn your HVAC on and off when you feel the need, rather than automating the maintenance of temperature by such unworthy means as a thermostat.

It’s just that you don’t think about all of the ones you already use. Elevators are the classic example here, or a washing machine.

Well no, the analogy would be if you got on an elevator and it could only be controlled by an app that you have to log in to use

One of the big benefits of Hue, as alluded to in this article, is that you didn’t need to use their cloud services or share any data. But that seems to be what is changing. Before, you could just run everything locally on your home network, or really on an isolated subnet since most of the communication happens over Zigbee. It is nice to have automation capabilities for some scenarios to avoid rewiring or to customize lighting for different purposes in the same space with one controller.

But if you don’t personally need it, you also don’t really need to drop in and bash the concept. It is useful for lots of folks and it’s just a fun game for lots of other folks. And most people can just ignore it.

I'm not bashing it, I just want to understand it better

But if you were, you were right, because it's mostly ridiculous.

Changing the color of white during the day is amazing. Having daylight temp bulbs at night is just "rude". Having the warm temp color during the day is much less "rude". Having the best of both worlds with one light and not having to think about it is pretty amazing.

Other than that, I just enjoy having the remote ability of turning lights on/off from my couch. I don't even have mine accessible via WAN, so it's not like "oh I forgot to turn off the lights" after leaving the house. they're LEDs, so I don't care!

Once you have the hue changing bulbs you can't go back so be warned for anyone reading. It's like learning about keming.

>> It's like learning about keming.

I see what you did there

> Having daylight temp bulbs at night is just "rude"

Wut, explain this to me?

there's lots of theories on this, to the point of having "blue light glasses".

however, mine is much more caveman like. during the day, the sun is up. at night, it is not, so it is dark and cold. man made fire. fire is good. fire is warm. light from fire is orange. man evolve using warm light at night. industry brings us blue light at night. blue light strange. makes things look harsh, unpleasant. caveman pushes button on magic rock that makes light back to warm color. caveman happy again.

grug feng shui

otherwise, mrs caveman not like cave.

also, caveman employer not like caveman. replace caveman with Flo since grug feng shui is so easy, even caveman can do it

Hahaha.

Thankyou for that, the perfect ELI5 for my morning brain.

I don't know what's going where I live but so many houses and temples use this horrible, ultra-bright, sterile blue/white lights with no diffusers. Many have pure white concrete walls as well so it's just like looking into a hospital or something. You'll be walking down a quiet alley and then BOOM witness our unfiltered arc-weld!

It's gotten to the point to where when I visit someone and they have a warm-colored light I compliment them on the fact. It's so rare.

To each their own. Maybe I should start criticizing people for having warm colored light that remind me of kerosene lamps. Have you entertained the remote possibility that more people prefer a different color than you do?

Maybe they chose that color. Maybe they didn’t know any better. Maybe they bought them from Amazon, but the listing was a switcheroo. Who really knows. But if they’re using “bright” white at night it’s just flat out rude. It’s unnatural, it’s unholy, it’s just wrong

One friend nicknamed me The Illuminazi due to my continued war against cool white lights used at night in homes.

In the later evening in our house we switch to all lamp-only lighting, as I find over head lights offensive in at least some time period immediately prior to going to bed.

Once upon a time, I had daylight color lights in my bedroom. My then GF was somewhat unhappy with that choice after a while, especially since it was winter when she moved in with me, and so outside was extra white. Since then we now mostly use warmer white bulbs excepting certain locations like the garage and laundry room.

Checkout: [1]

I am using Adaptive Lighting with Home Assistant & Zigbee2MQTT + Hue bulbs.

My home has never felt this "smart" before. Every time my lights turns on I find the color and brightness to be perfect.

[1]: https://github.com/basnijholt/adaptive-lighting

I don't care much about the automation itself, but in general having control over your lights is ludicrously nice. It helps me a lot with maintaining my sleep schedule, which in retrospect I suppose my favorite part does rely on automation which is a light alarm.

But we'll generally have very very dim lights on throughout the early evening into bed time which makes it much easier for me to fall asleep.

Waking up to office-white-lights will also really wake you up.

Also: parties. It's fun to be able to do nice pink and blue lights or a low-lit candle-like scenario, depending on the vibe.

Yep same. Wall switches work fine. Manual thermostats work fine. Fuck spending all that money on such trivia and time keeping it programmed and updated and dealing with stuff like the subject of TFA.

I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. I leave the room, I turn the lights off. I have no need to operate lights in rooms that I'm not in.

> Wall switches work fine

Yes but it's nice to have extra functionality.

I use the wireless Hue dimmer switches, the batteries last a long time. I have one on my coffee table... it's nice to dim lights for multiple lamps from the couch, or adjust the colour temperature. My wall switches have no dimming dial, nor do my lamps. I can't go back to non-dimmable lamps.

Dimmers can be fitted where existing light switches are, and lamps can be fitted with dimmers, either mounted in or on the lamp, or online with the power cable.

It's just a different type of consumer luxury or hobby, unnecessary but also fun and rewarding.

I do hardware modifications and small electrical upgrades / changes myself, it's cheaper and I find it enjoyable and rewarding. Most recently I fit a dimmer to a high velocity ducted workshop fan, so now it has full variable speed control, as it's quite powerful and all the CFM isn't always required or desirable.

Writing that blog post probably took more time than I spend on light switches in a year. Now buying, installing, configuring, fixing and tweaking takes probably 100x times more. Not to mention time spent on a shrink coach after these things drive you mad.

This thing is basically a hobby, so I understand if you have no interest with home automation. That being said, I prefer using smart wall switches than smart light bulbs. I think smart light bulbs are wasteful (more expensive than standard light bulbs, and you will be throwing out a perfectly good zigbee unit just because the LED died). The only benefits seems to be dimming and color changing, but I don't have the need for them because I can just use some night lights for that purpose (also with ZigBee switches). With smart wall switches, everything still behave exactly like before (heck, you can even still use your old switches, just wire them into the small ZigBee switch module), but now they're accessible for tinkering via Home Assistant.

My two favorite automations are dead simple, but would be tricky to solve any other way. I have them set up with Home Assistant running on my local network, so there's no data going to anyone else, and no dependency on a cloud service.

The first is, my mailbox is across the street, and I'd like to know when the mail comes. So I have a Z-wave door sensor in the mailbox to send me a notification to my phone when the mailbox is opened.

The other is to nag us to move laundry to the dryer. I have a Z-wave power meter that my washing machine plugs in to, and another Z-wave door sensor on the door. When the power meter detects the washing machine stop using power, it waits a few minutes and sends a notification to unload every few minutes, until the door is opened.

Really neat, thanks for sharing!

My sprinkler system is automated and internet connected. It’s on a schedule but I can override it when I’m not home. So if it’s raining, I can turn it off when away. It also knows the forecast and is quite good about skipping watering. Water is expensive where I live so I appreciate this.

You could add humidity sensors in the mix so plants only are watered when below a certain humidity.

My i initial reaction was that i could DOS ur phone through ur mailbox. I guess i spent too much time in tech…

I did accidentally DOS my phone for a bit when working on the washing machine automation, since I forgot to put in the sleep for it to wait a few minutes.

>appeal of it

the appeal is technology as hedonistic consumption. People just love spending money on 'tech', even if it actually costs them more time and money, which is fundamentally the opposite of what technology is supposed to accomplish.

So in this sense it isn't even automation, it's anti-automation because just about every person I've met who is into home automation spends significant amounts of resources on things like flipping a light switch on.

Warning: my comment only addresses my use case for automation. I don't use cloud services either. I also kinda just kept writing, so this is a bit of a text wall.

I live in an old house. 80% of the lights in my house are operated by walking up to them and twisting the stem. The remaining 20% are switched.

To properly turn the lights on in my living room, I have to visit four separate lamps and turn each one on. The dining room has three lamps, bedroom has three, office has three, etc. When it's time for bed, I have to walk around the house turning each lamp off. If I want them dim, no luck. To do that would require either all new lamp fixtures, or rewiring the house with new dimmer switches.

Or, that was how it was before I did the Zigbee/HomeAssistant thing. Now I just hit that master switch on my nightstand and all the lights turn off. My whole house changes into "Night Mode". The thermostat will widen the setpoints. The doors lock if they weren't already. If I happen to get up at 3AM to take a piss or get a glass of water, the lights all know to come on at minimum brightness, and to turn off shortly thereafter.

My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).

I have an ancient stove and oven. No electronics at all. So I wrote a simple automation to alert me if the kitchen motion sensor's temperature rises 10°F more than the rest of the house, for longer than 30 minutes. This has saved me a couple of times now when I forgot to turn the oven off. (It takes a good hour for that temp sensor to reach the threshold as well. I wrote that automation after discovering that my oven had been on for hours. When I looked through the temp logs, I saw a clear signal I could use in the future.)

I also put a remote temp sensor in one of my HVAC registers. Comparing its reading to the ambient reading gives me a ΔT on my air conditioner, and a couple years ago the steadily-declining value of that delta alerted me to a refrigerant leak weeks before it would have been large enough to notice otherwise. I was able to get that repaired in the spring rather than in the heat of summer. This isn't something I would have done with a regular thermometer; having to remember to check it every so often and do the math taking into account the humidity and the elapsed time since the start of the cycle. But seeing all that temp data logged over many weeks makes the pattern easy to spot.

In the den I sometimes want it to be bright enough to read or do detailed work, and other times I want it dim so there's no glare while watching TV. Before, that meant I would have to buy lamps with a dimmer on them, then dim each one and go flip the ceiling fan light off. Now when I click the switch[1] to turn the TV/stereo combo on, it automatically dims the lights at either end of the couch, and turns the overhead light off.

Color temperature! That's another thing that isn't possible without some smartness in the bulbs. At night my whole house is as close to 2200K as possible. I really like that kind of light. But in the middle of the day, my kitchen lights are closer to 3300K.

My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.

[1] I originally put a Tasmota wall relay in to save the 20W (!) of idle power my old stereo receiver was constantly drawing. When I realized I always fiddled with the lights whenever I turn the TV/stereo on, I just automated that away.

Thanks for sharing, really interesting

> My front door lock used to be a pain in the ass when I had my hands full of groceries. Or my coffee and the mail. Now my door unlocks automatically when I walk up to it. It's a small joy, but it reliably makes me smile each time. (And I don't have an ugly keypad, and still have a standard key slot if I need it).

What equipment did you use for your lock? Is it an off-the-shelf or roll-your-own setup? I'd like something like this but so far all the consumer-oriented smart locks give me very little confidence.

It’s a Kwikset 914S2. It’s Zwave only so you need a hub. And the whole auto-unlock thing I rolled my own. If Home Assistant sees that my phone came home within the past 2 minutes, then it assumes whatever motion is detected is me and unlocks the door.

Do you really think someone is going to break into your home by cracking the security of your smart lock? I’m not OP but I use August smart locks and they work great, easy to install, nothing on the exterior to give it away, and it unlocks automatically when I get home. Could someone hack into the August servers and remotely unlock my door? Could the Bluetooth connection from my phone be spoofed? I’m sure it’s possible but the effort level is 1000x beyond what anyone would reasonably do to break into my home. Anyone motivated to break into my house would just break a window with a rock. The convenience is incredible. Seriously, I haven’t had to worry about my keys in years, and since it automatically locks the door after two minutes my house is safer than ever. Not having to think “did I remember to lock the door before I left?” is such a weight off my mind, and being able to unlock it remotely is an added bonus even though it rarely gets used by anyone outside of the family.

I don't think some petty criminal is going to say "Hey, that Nerdbert, he sure has expensive-looking elbows, I want to break into his house and see what else I can find there, so I'm going to spend the next two years learning how to custom-craft an exploit for his smart lock."

What I think is that there's going to be a fundamental flaw in the device's security, and before there's any update from the manufacturer, word will get out in the criminal underworld that you just need to install such-and-such app on your phone and load a data file and then you can make all locks from Company X pop open just by walking down the street.

> My porch light turns on 30 minutes after sunset and off before sunrise. It's under a roof so I would have needed to either replace the switch with one of those fancy ones, or installed a photocell somewhere else. But it was just a couple automations added to the config file to get that functionality.

Eww, that's gross, especially for all the migrating birds and wildlife, just so you can have a terrible light on outside when you don't need it at all.

Basically you're harming wildlife https://birdcast.info/

And you're worsening the environment with needless and completely unutilized light pollution. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution

Wow.

I long ago realized that I sleep as well on a couch as I do on a bed, and got rid of my bed next time I moved. However, there is no good place to put a light near the couch such that the switch would be easily reachable while on the couch.

Solution: Hue lights that I can control from Alexa. If I'm dozing off while reading on the couch before bed, I can turn the lights off without having to wake up enough to actually go reach a switch.

All my locks are normal locks that use normal keys (although they are actually called "SmartKey" locks, but that just refers to the clever way they can be rekeyed [1], which is entirely mechanical). I have considered getting one smart lock that has voice and app control because I live alone.

The idea there is that if I have a medical emergency that incapacitates me so that I cannot unlock a door but doesn't incapacitate me so much that I can't call 911, I can unlock a door so when the ambulance arrives they don't have to break in to get me.

[1] The way you rekey them is you put in your current key, turn 90 degrees clockwise, insert a tool they provide into a hole that is next to the keyway to press a release in the back of the hole, remove that tool, and you can then remove the current key (carefully leaving the cylinder rotated 90 degrees). At that point you can put a different key in, and then turn the cylinder 180 degrees counterclockwise. The lock is now keyed to that key instead of the key you started with.

For most people it's just consumer luxury but my grandmother's place has some neat tricks that really improve her independence. Using anything fiddly like lamps and keys is actually a serious challenge for her. 10 years ago her TV was too complicated but now she has a voice remote and it works pretty well.

Anything that makes life a little easier is good for anyone with marginal capabilities, which is like millions of people and eventually everyone if they manage to live long enough.

My car charger turns on and adjusts the charging amp based on how much solar energy I'm getting from the sun. I know this will eventually be replaced by some 3rd party solution, but when I did it there were none.

I wouldn’t be shocked if third party solutions become mandatory for this use case in the near future, similar to how smart thermostats controlled by the utility company are a thing already. I know some areas have incentive programs to have utility controlled car charging plugs already as well.

There are several advantages.

I use a connected smart bulb, that has color changing. During bed time, I use it for reading books, and before sleeping, change it to a night light. I use it as a soft light when watching movies on my laptop. This is a convenience for me.

I also use smart lights to automatically turn on and off inside my home, and outside, in the portico.

I use automated socket outlets to turn on / off the water heater in my bath, on a schedule.

A lot of advantages in these things is in the option to schedule them, or make them act on the input of a sensor (movement, light, etc)

If you have lots of windows and lots of shades, you can open and close them all at once, making life easier if you and your spouse disagree if they should be mostly open or mostly closed, possibly saving your marriage if that applies. Lights follow the same trend: it isn’t that turning on and off the lights is a pain, but being able to turn on or off all the lights with just one command is useful. We’ve only bothered with our open kitchen living room, but we had 4 switches all around the 2nd floor to manipulate before (and we went Lutron for our shades anyways, so we can set scenes with both).

I don’t get the mood lighting. And really, if I lived alone I would just keep the shades up all the time and forgo the electric shades as well (but given my wife they are indispensable).

I have normal lights, but the switches are on a Lutron hub. I like being able to set movie mode to dim lights from my couch on my watch or phone. I like being able to turn off my kids' bathroom light when it shines too brightly in my face at night when I'm trying to sleep. I like being able to turn the lights off across the whole house when I leave, and have smart away when I leave for awhile.

Smart thermostats are nice when you want to adjust things from all over the house or keep a schedule relatively easily. I also like knowing if my basement sump pump isn't keeping up with rain water and flooding things.

In general, it's nice to be able to monitor things and control them across the house, and the Lutron setup has been pretty painless.

Some things I do, all running locally with Home Assistant so minimal cloud shenanigans:

* Turn the light red in my laundry room when a load is done

* Turn all my lights off when I set my alarm at night

* Slowly turn light on before my alarm goes off in the morning

* Turn off lights when I leave the house, then turn on the one by my front door if I get home after dark

None of these are life changing, but they're all marginally useful. And for me, half the fun is the sense of accomplishment getting these automations to work

if you live in an inhospitable climate (arizona for example) with pets or perhaps otherwise disabled individuals left at home (grandparents?), remote ability to control thermostat has proven useful.

that said, useful in this case means saving a bit of money by adjusting its settings. a manual (non cloud) thermostat would work too.

So am I, but I really wanted to control lighting (color ans temperature) in my living room and smart bulbs was the easiest way I could do it. I had some random cheap polish wifi lights but the delays on controlling then just drove me off. Decided to switch to hue at some point and just color quality and responsiveness was better.

I only have them for that and I love to adjust the mood via lighting. I don't care about any further automation. I also don't care much if it was Philips or someone else that gave me light bulbs.

I've been really enjoying voice controls for my lights. It's not always more convenient than my lights, but overall I like the experience.

With Apple TV + a home pod I also get a fair bit of TV control with my voice which is nice.

I have a bunch of things at the office set to automatically turn off at a certain time or on command. It's helpful in that I don't leave something running that really shouldn't be, like a laminator, overnight. After that I decided to put an Alexa plug on anything that could potentially be a fire hazard if left on, like the air purifiers and fans.

It's hardly a bulletproof solution but it's better than the old solution of, "Oh shit, I think I left X running… welp, time to waste 40 minutes driving back and forth."

Webcam with motion detection pointed directly down at our cat litters. Motion triggers a lamp switching on so I can hopefully get to and remove any poo before the stench of it bleeds into the house.

Opening garage with phone (esp via voice if your hands are full) is killer app. I don’t have to carry any keys anymore (not that we need to lock up often)

I can dim my backyard lights, turn on and off my porch light depending on the sun's position, control my home thermostat to heat or cool via phone before I am home, control my washing machine and dryer or know if they are done, open garage remotely with my app or close it, turn on any lights of the house or turn them off if I am in bed with my phone, control my TV via phone if I lose the remote (likely somewhere in the couch), also I use a lot of smart plugs to control individual devices such as fans, manual electric devices that are always set to be on, etc...

I have auto changing hue color lights for when I'm doing exctacy at home to give it a rave feel.

I like to dim and make the color warm at night too. But every already said that hundred times.

I have much automated, but my favorite is a $20 multicolored hexagon WiFi light with a long usb power cable I nestled along the door frame from power to the light above my wife’s office door. I wrote a swift daemon to monitor her work mac’s camera and microphone usage as well as idle time, and decide whether to set the little hexagon over the door to red, yellow, green, or off depending on camera use, mic-only use, idle under or over threshold, respectively. That way I know whether I can safely interrupt, and with what degree of caution. It’s been a champ, but I did need to modify the code when she upgraded from intel to m1, to listen to camera logging events rather than checking the hardware directly, but other than that it makes me happy every time I walk by it.

Second is more common, but also makes me happy every time: I put a contact sensor on the interior door to the attached garage that when opened quickly turns on the light to the garage, and turns it off a few minutes after that door next closes. It sure beats walking into a dark garage to fumble for a switch.

A lot of these answers conflate remote control with automation. Some of these devices seem to offer remote control, some offer actual automation. I also love not having to get up and hit arrow keys on my television monitor to change the channel. Likewise, my ceiling fans have radio controllers. It would be nice if lights had those as well. On the other hand, I feel no need for motion detectors, voice control, or any kind of service running on a server somewhere trying to learn when I want the lights on or off. But a switch that can be flipped without having to walk to wherever the wall-mounted switch is would be nice. That can be a simple radio device or infrared or whatever they prefer, just like a television remote. Don't need an app that requires an account with a remote service. Same thing with a thermostat. When I first married and moved in with my wife a decade ago, she had Nest thermostats and those things annoyed the hell out of me, using eco settings by default, requiring access to WiFi, trying to learn my living patterns. Some of these answers are right. The longstanding automation offered by thermostats was great. I like being able to program when I want specific temperatures in specific rooms and then it just happens. But that was enough. I don't need a cloud-based service to learn when I'm home and in what rooms. I already know that.

I bought a Philips Hue lightbulb because it was the easiest way to get a dimmable lamp in my living room.

I’d rather install open source JavaScript code via curl and sudo than install closed source binaries via an iOS app. This is for something with a permanent place on your home network.

Rachel is usually spot on, but dogma won the day today. Home assistant is great, and I’ll go one step further: I don’t care a bit what language a tool is written in. Plenty of insecure and malicious C in the world.

You can audit what you're installing as it's open source. Such an odd hill to die on.

Congratulations, you’ve now signed up to audit a genuine morass of a code base. It’s full of terribly written JavaScript hacked together by people who more or less know how to write a class. But hey, at least you can read the code.

If you're so violently allergic to JavaScript just use OpenHAB, which is written in good old Java.

As I made clear in my post it’s the quality of the code, not the language.

You, and 60k other people who have starred it or 80ish people that have recently committed.

OpenSSL would like a word.

This is quickly becoming a problem with a lot of Home Automation.

Too many companies are finally realizing that thanks to matter their products are basically going to become commodities. No longer is there an advantage to sticking within a single platform to avoid hubs (ok so maybe "no longer" is jumping forward a few years but still, the steps are happening now).

The part that really frustrates me, my Hue devices are the most reliable devices in my home automation behind my HomePods. On a fairly regular basis my other home automation devices will just randomly not work, loose connection, or just generally have issues. I am not exactly itching move away from that reliability and I feel like Phillips Hue likely knows this.

This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has... it seems kind against Ikea for them to go down a locking down approach?)

The main thing for reliability for me is ... is there wired ethernet to the device or hub, and NOT wifi or bluetooth to the final switch/bulb.

"real" protocols like Zigbee and friends seem to work well.

Hmm, I hadn't thought about it before but I do wonder if that is part why it is as reliable as it is. I believe the Hue hub is ethernet only while my other hubs are all wifi.

However I think the Ikea hub I had was ethernet only so not sure if that's the entire answer.

Ikea has gotten quite a bit better. Most of their devices are Zigbee 3.0 now, and work fine.

> This includes Ikea when I tried their smart tech just a couple years ago. It was incredibly unreliable and I do question actually recommending it (that being said, maybe they have gotten better and I would love for someone here to tell me has...

I have had IKEA bulbs and outlets for over two years (adding to it over that time) and have great experiences and high reliability.

Hue is already not a commodity, since they make the by far nicest and most reliable lights. Making their product shittier isn't making it more competitive.

My most reliable home automation devices are the Lutron Caseta. I've never had any problems, aside from changing the batteries on the shades. The Ikea stuff is decent now but wasn't so great 6 years ago. I still have the original tradfri hub. An annoyance with them is that because you want to be able to control them with a physical switch, a power-outage will result in them coming back on when the power returns, instead of remembering their last power setting. They may have fixed this since last I looked. I'm just using the hub for the smart blinds at the moment.

Another plug for Hubitat: https://hubitat.com/

Does Zwave and Zigbee with Matter on the way at some point. HomeKit integration is in beta right now.

My fear is that Philips will do something stupid by pushing a firmware to the bulbs to lock folks into only using their hubs. Or maybe change colour reporting to some annoying method that won’t allow for accurate colour on a non-Hue hub.

The enshittification continues.

Priced decent. Where do you pair new stuff? In their interface or homekit?

Pairing is in Web UI. Has built-in drivers for most use cases with a bunch of other devices supported by their very welcoming community.

Idk the hardware specs are pretty anemic for $150. OK I guess if you don't have any other device laying around. Zigbee USB adapters are $15 on Amazon

Do you have a link or a brand/model? I'm just recently shopping for smart home equipment and the Hubitat seems quite full-featured and I'd like to compare.

It's perfectly suitable and it looks like one of the better out-of-the box solutions out there that respect user privacy. If I don't have any SBCs and just want something that works without fiddling, I'd likely go for Hubitat too.

That said if you're up for fiddling, something like https://www.amazon.ca/Waveshare-VisionFive2-Processor-Integr... will provide much more oopmh (and it's RISC-V) with 4GB ram and m2 slot, at $100 CAD, with mainline kernel support (so any USB devices will just work). Grab a zigbee USB + SBC like that, and you'd be able to run much more on your hub that just a gateway for your devices.

You don’t pay for HW specs. You pay for the whole package, with software and their continues updates.

And they take compatibility seriously. I’m a refugee from home assistant from 5 years ago, when each major update would break part of my automations because they deprecated some API. No such thing with Hubitat.

Oh thanks for that, it looks very handy! I use ZWave and Home Assistant's support is functional but flakey since they moved to zwave-js. Plus I have better things to do that maintain my automation server.

can you share what you mean by flakey? I maintain the integration so I am curious :)

I've used an older version of their hub and it was great.

With the most recent 2.3.6 release of Hubitat HomeKit support is no longer in beta.

https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-2-3-6-available/1247...

Sadly there is no money in home automation unless you can force them into your SaaS service. Making a good product and selling it once just doesn't get Wall Street excited anymore.

Honestly, I'd blame Wall Street here more than the tech companies, but it's really everyone's fault. Tech compensates people with stock, so everyone is incentivized to make the stock go up. That's not always doing what's best for the customer.

But also running a hardware business where every customer buys something once is a tough low margin business. New players don't want to get into the game and old players have to placate Wall Street. Even Apple is shifting more and more into services, but they can vertically integrate and are already "upscale". No one can pull of being an upscale light switch.

Honestly I think open source is the only thing that will save us here, but sadly there isn't a lot of money in that either.

> Sadly there is no money in home automation unless you can force them into your SaaS service. Making a good product and selling it once just doesn't get Wall Street excited anymore.

Cloud servers cost money to run. Security updates cost money. Firmware updates cost money. Mobile apps have ongoing costs, you can't just release an app into the stores and have it keep working, Google and Apple keep demanding updates.

One time fees on low margin consumer electronics is not a sustainable model.

I'm pretty sure the margin is not low on Hue lights and switches. They are not cheap.

And surely an app can keep working with minimal updates, I don't see that as a huge expense for Hue.

I had friends who worked on a very popular consumer electric device before who revealed the ugly economics of it to me.

Cost to build, around $7. Retail price, over $30. Profit for the company, around $3.

Distributors and retailers took the remaining.

Selling stuff in physical stores is a nasty business. I remember these numbers whenever I see people complain about app stores taking a 30% cut.

All of these can be predicted, more or less, over expected product lifetime and added to initial product price. Nothing stops from manufacturer to say "10 years of security updates" on a box, and then you're on your own.

Right, but very few customers are willing to pay that upfront price to avoid a cloud service. Most consumers don't care.

And then you lose out to the competitor who only factors in 2 years of updates. Who then loses out to the competitor who doesn't factor in costs at all.

And then suddenly that last company finds itself successful and needs a plan to actually stay in business, so they update their EULA and start pushing a subscription service.

Or, more commonly, they just go out of business.

Actually there is, but it's not cheap, so it doesn't appeal to the average consumer. KNX and DALI are effectively the standard in Europe for large commercial buildings. Green building certifications are requiring lights that turn on and off automatically based on occupancy and ambient conditions, and nothing else even comes close to matching it for this. Remote monitoring and management saves money compared to having someone periodically inspect every light in a building.

They are available for residential installs too, but for a new build you are talking about paying the price of a car (and not a Dacia) on top of what you'd pay for a standard lighting installation, so it's only a thing in luxury homes. For that you end up with truly automatic lighting (controlling lights with your phone is not home automation), variable colour temperature and much higher quality lighting.

But the average consumer doesn't care. A lot of the time they can't even replace a bulb in a set with the same colour temperature.

> Sadly there is no money in home automation unless you can force them into your SaaS service

Source? Phillips/Signify seems to have been very happy to sell expensive but great light bulbs for many years. Why do you think that's not profitable?

> What can you do about it? Before you say "Home Assistant", let me stop you right there. Javascript plus a "curl | sudo sh" attitude to life equals "yeah no, I am never touching this thing".

Not sure what the author is playing at here.

You can run HA as a Docker container, and I'm pretty sure Hue is a built-in integration.

All of the integrations are open source, so if someone flicking your lights on and off while you're baking cookies or something is a concern, others would have spotted it.

I thought HA was difficult since that's the vibe it gets. It was crazy easy to get going with. Took me a few hours to get all 30+ of my bulbs (different vendors too), locks, cameras, etc. baked in and working with HomeKit.

Ring took a little longer because Amazon, but I got it done.

I have run Home Assistant for ~9 years. I've done so with the core system in a virtual environment all along, and it's been great. I run my own local mosquitto server for MQTT in its own systemd service, bridged with one on my web server for remote stuff. You can do all this without any `curl | sudo sh` using excellent open source documentation.

mosquitto is pretty great

Technology has moved so quickly we literally can't have anything nice for more than 5 years before they start innovating on revenue streams.

I used to be a massive technophile but now I have the dumbest home of all my family and friends and I wouldn't change it for the world.

Going to ignore the author and say: yes, HomeAssistant is indeed a viable and reasonably secure (if self-hosted) alternative.

Whenever buying a "smart" light/switch/outlet, I always make sure it can be flashed to Tasmota so I can keep my home automation as self-hosted as possible.

Hue's descent was inevitable and lights/switches/outlets have long life spans. Don't trust your smart devices to corporate whims.

This is the counter-intuitive issue with the open protocol, Zigbee. Manufacturers are free to implement it however they want, which will always result in enshittification.

Counter-intuitively, the closed standard, Z-Wave, operates more like an open ecosystem. My Z-Wave Thermostat (ACD-2000, nearly the only Z-Wave thermostat that doesn't look like it hails from the 90s) swears that it requires the Alarm.com ecosystem on the store page - but the simple truth is that it wouldn't be Z-Wave compliant (and therefore couldn't be sold) if it didn't work with any hub (Aoetec in my setup - they are particularly friendly with the HA community). Compare this with an Ecobee: a Zigbee device which requires their hub (and other Zigbee devices are unlikely to work with the Ecobee hub, so I'm sure you get the idea).

Hue bulbs are one firmware update away from the same situation, even though Philips have "promised" not to.

I'm not sure what the situation is with Matter/Thread - my Google fu isn't strong enough to determine whether it will go the way of Zigbee (which it's based on, but merely as a channel) or Z-Wave.

As for LEDs and the rest? ESPHome. I do have some Hues, but that hub will go in the trash once all the bulbs burn out.

My family is always bitching me out for the slightest thing that goes wrong with my home automation. My wife would absolutely refuse to use any A/V gear that involves logging in: I mean, this has been normalized by streaming but you never have to log in to use a Blu-Ray player.

That’s funny! As a single guy who’s always bitching at myself for my failing home automation, I understand your family’s pain of just wanting to do something simple like turn on a light but they can’t because dad wanted the “fAnCy LiGhTs”! lmao

The AV forums used to call it the "wife acceptance factor" but it's a huge reality.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/11/19/the-jim-saga.-...

And having it extend to have to piss by the light of your cell phone (just before you drop it in the toilet) because you're groggy and can't remember the right incantation to get lights on ...

You should probably listen to them. It’s great to have tinkering hobbies but please don’t subject others to your whims just because you are in a position of authority.

> My family is always bitching me out for the slightest thing that goes wrong with my home automation.

er...why are you whinging and being mean about them? it is you who has made their home annoying. you should fix it or get rid of all the things that are making their lives annoying.

I bought a Samsung Smart Things hub and many hundreds of dollars worth of $90 Lutron ZWave switches and dimmers about 5 years ago. Within 6 months, Samsung discontinued support for my hub and remotely bricked it for me.

At the time, other main brand hubs didn't want to do ZWave.

I stopped following the dumpster fire after that and now I just turn my lights on and off like a plebe with my fingers.

I’m still using 9 year old hue bulbs, none have failed. The hub finally did, or rather the bricked it with an update and then trying to fix it lost all my config this year so I switched to home assistant finally

Couldn’t be happier and my nearly decade old hue bulbs will continue to work

Nice. I've been creepily learing at Home Assistant from the run down apartment across the street for some years now...

This is why I really try to buy devices that can run Tasmota. Any Tuya compatible device can be flashed to work with Tasmota. I have actually left some devices with the Tuya firmware on there - their app is pretty decent. But I know if I need to I can flash Tasmota and make it appear on my network like a legacy Phillips Hue or Belkin Wemo device that doesn't require an account.

Buying hardware that can run open firmware is nice for future proofing in case the vendor goes sideways with their firmware. I do the same for routers with OpenWRT.

> Any Tuya compatible device can be flashed to work with Tasmota.

That's... not true. There are many items of the Tuya ecosystem resistant to flashing with another firmware.

Maybe not 100%, but all the ones I have tried have worked with tuya-convert. https://tasmota.github.io/docs/Tuya-Convert/

> Any Tuya compatible device can be flashed to work with Tasmota.

Hm, no not really. I have a bunch of remote controlled sockets that can't be reflashed with Tasmota and that require a ridiculous number of hoops to jump through to access including enabling 'developer mode' and access from a bunch of IPs in China. No thanks... really annoying because it was exactly one of those comments that caused me to buy them in the first place.

I still turn my lights on with a switch on the wall. I always wondered why people wanted to turn on their lights with an app, but maybe there's some life quality thing I'm totally missing out on?

My personal use case is an older (1979) house with insufficient or poorly placed switch/switched outlet locations and my general dislike of can/LED puck lighting in living spaces.

My kitchen, for example, has 4 separate light circuits for tasks: under cabinet lights, 2 cans with spotlight LEDs over the sink, multiple can lights around the perimeter, and 3 over the kitchen table. They're all on Kasa switches and hooked to Alexa for voice control. So, you can turn on the sink lights to wash dishes without touching anything and lights can be turned on/off in groups no matter where you are standing.

Other living areas use a combo of table and floor lamps at multiple locations/outlets, so it's nice to be able to turn everything on together by room with a voice command. These rooms have a switched outlet, but that's a single location, and in one room, the switch is not positioned well.

My bed has 4 or 5 light fixtures that can shine on it, and only one is easily reachable from the bed.

my lights turn themselves on gradually, with the sunset. They also turn themselves off if they're still on late at night, or when I leave the house.

You’re missing out on not needing to think about turning on your lights. Come home at 6pm every night after work; lights come on at 5:55pm. Come home at different times of the night; set up a motion sensor to trigger the lights when the door opens or per room. Don’t want to set up a motion sensor? Geofence your house. Seasons changing mean sunset is later; have logic that only turns on lights after sunset. Kids are only allowed to watch tv until 8pm; automate the tv turning off at 8pm. Its limitless what you can do. This is all very easy to do using something like HomeKit. Each day adds minutes back in your life; span that across a lifetime and it makes a difference.

Minutes each day? I spend at most 20 seconds a day switching lights on and off in my house. Setting all that up would probably involve more time than operating my light switches for a lifetime.

This is why I went the zigbee2mqtt + Node-RED + homebridge route. But I run them under https://github.com/piku with pinned versions from NPM, so that there’s no weird install scripts.

(although to be fair I would ditch everything written in JavaScript if there were suitable replacements - alas, there aren’t)

Other than that, I’ve been very careful to only pick ZigBee devices that would work with an OSS coordinator and that would either bridge automatically to HomeKit or that I could translate events for via Node-RED (over the years Node-RED has become more of a dashboard than a translator, which is great).

What are alternatives for things like light bulbs, switches, sockets, etc other? We are currently building a new house and I have requested non-smart wall switches/sockets etc. The default (as our build is off a standardised plan) is for 'smart' switches/sockets using some brand of Cloud-based service which I believe isn't an open protocol like Zigbee. It seems to me that no matter which ecosystem it's always attached to the cloud somehow.

It is a shame Phillips Hue has gone down this path as I would have seriously considered their gear otherwise.

Maybe I'm a luddite but I can't see any advantage installing with gear reliant on cloud access.

you can roll your own with matter devices and home assistant. that being said, ideology aside - life is short so I've opted to use smartthings which has been fine for me personally for several years now

Aside from z-wave, which I already have and doesn't seem to be super reliable, I've been looking at some of the first gen matter stuff. I'm not sure if it's ready for prime time yet.

I recently started with home assistant. 80 bucks mini PC from Amazon, 25 bucks zigbee stick and bunch of different relays, modules, switches around the house. Easily setup HVAC fresh air ventilation (already had ducts in place but it was stupid x minutes per hour, now it is dependent on outside temperature), easily made my dumb switches smart where needed without them looking any different from the rest. In addition esphome on garage door opener motor with couple zigbee sensors on garage doors themselves to make my motors "smart"...

Unfortunately, to get there most out of it you have to go to AliExpress to have a selection of modules, but I made it a journey, rather than a project

You don't have to go AliExpress, but you can. HomeAssistant can run a stupid number of integrations:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#all

...including all the big names like Hue. Nest. Ring. Yale. Schlage. Ikea. HomeKit. Plex. Sonos. Alexa. Sure, you can integrate arbitrary digital/MQTT/Zigbee/BLE stuff you find on AliExpress for pennies, or you can buy the name-brand stuff from big box stores.

You're not locked into just the Hue ecosystem just because you have their bulbs. I don't understand why HomeKit doesn't just talk to the bulbs instead of allowing Phillips to force you to go through their hub. This is on Apple for not supporting the lights directly.

AliExpress offers variety that brand names don't. I am talking about relays mostly. Different setups, different voltage, etc. If something of the shelf that fits your need available from a reputable brand - that's always preferable. But if you need to implement something not available - AliExpress likely get that covered.

Go with something that supports Matter, like Nanoleaf. You can add a bulb with Matter to HomeKit, Google Home, Amazon's thing, etc. at the same time. With HomeKit, at least, you can keep everything as local as you want, and still have shiny apps to manage all your gear.

90% of the smartshit I installed was novelty and now unused. Color changing bulbs? Set to one color. Dimming? Rarely used.

So I’d install dimmers and lights as normal and retrofit maybe some smart stuff later.

Yeah it’s all very stupid. We got rid of it all and are grateful to have dimmer switches on the walls. The occasional smart socket is nice but home lighting is a solved problem that phones don’t make better.

I agree - I'm a few steps away from going full luddite and running only dimmable incandescents and kerosene lanterns.

https://www.sevarg.net/tag/lights/

What's the old joke about technology?

    Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart. 

    Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.

Agree, I think it's better to just keep it simple at first and add on smart stuff later. That gives me time for research as well.

If you're ok with wifi protocols, Kaufman[1] makes bulbs, switches and plugs that all run ESPHome out of the box. I have some bulbs and one of the plugs and they all work nicely.

[1]: https://kaufha.com

Well, you already skipped the better alternative. Lutron or crestron.

I stopped using smart lightbulbs and moved to using Sonoff ZigBee-enabled wall switches. They work fine with a zigbee2mqtt controller.

KNX for new buildings. But it's quite expensive, like $25 per portand there's a maximum on 64 devices on a twisted pair line. You can have up to 15 lines on a backbone with line repeates (= area) and then max 15 areas with area couplers. There are also KNX to IP routers.

https://www.knx.org/knx-en/for-your-home/

But they can't beat Sonos.

Sonos is the eiptome of enshittification. Pretty good hardware screwed over by bad software, growth marketing, and middle-finger to UX.

I have half-a-dozen devices at my home--almost 10 years old. I do not use the app, I do not do updates.

My hack: Use them with Echo dot. Apparently the backdoor Sonos team has overlooked so far.

I've been pretty happy with the Kasa switches and bulbs. They have a cloud component, but you don't have to use it to control them. The protocol has been figured out and is a simple socket payload (I wrote a command line app to prove it to myself), and of course they are controllable by HA.

They're 2.4G Wifi, but I can't get too bothered about that. I've optimized my coverage with multiple, decent APs, so it seems silly not to use it. I'm jaded on Z-Wave after I had multiple GE Z-Wave switches just burn out on me after a couple years. I've also retired my Samsung Smartthings and Hue hub, and I don't want to buy another hub for a few lights. I also can't see paying $30+ for a light switch; the Kasa units are frequently on sale for a reasonable $10.

If they rely on a central server, what guarantee do you have that it won’t all go to shit with no warning? You certainly can’t rely on the economics of the situation, so what’s left is relying on some nebulous concept of “reputation” and that has been proven over and over again by the largest and smallest companies to be worthless…

They need the central server/phone app to be initially provisioned, but they can be controlled entirely locally after that. No phone app needed.

I'd prefer completely open, but I haven't found anything as well made and inexpensive that's also open.

Why is the proposed solution HomeKit? It requires an Apple device to control it and an iCloud Account.

Are account requirements from some companies better than other?

If you already have an iCloud account, the additional requirements for HomeKit are zero.

"Hue" accounts have no other purpose, so zero people already have one.

I'm gonna be honest, I've never understood the appeal of a smart bulb. I installed dimmer switches in each room of my house and bought LED bulbs that get redder when dimmed (like incandescent bulbs naturally do). I turn on the lights when I walk into a room, turn them down when it gets dark outside, and turn them off when I leave or go to sleep.

To those who do find value in WiFi-connected bulbs: what makes them worth it to you? I'm genuinely curious, because if Home Depot's lightbulb aisle is any indication I'm the odd one.

I use zigbee devices, not WiFi, but the principle is the same.

Some of my smart bulbs support multiple colors. I can use the Daylight setting during the day, Sunset setting in the evening (for a warmer light) and Red for late night so I don't kill my night vision.

Also it's just fun to play with the colors.

As for the rest of my lights it's nice to be able to turn everything off and on all at once. Sometimes my kids leave lights on when they go to bed, I don't have to wander around turning them off (no, I'm not going to wake them up to do it). I can turn on my outside lights and scare off any skunks really quickly when one of my dogs needs to go out at night.

So on and so forth.

Thanks for sharing! Zigbee is way more interesting to me than WiFi-based. I can see the appeal of being able to turn all the lights off at once—do you use an app for that, or is it a physical device somewhere?

Can do it with a physical switch, an automation or voice. I have all 3 enabled.

At the moment, using an Amazon Echo that has a zigbee controller in it. It directly controls all devices.

"Alexa turn off all lights"

So you don't need to walk up from your bed to turn it off, as a starter.

Is it essential? Absolutely not. But it's definitely more convenient and it's hard to go back once you get used to it.

My go-to example to explain the convenience aspect is dishwasher. I'm from a country where dishwasher isn't common. And I personally never find the appeal of it especially when I live alone (i.e. very few dishes). I wash my pot/skillet immediately after cooking, and wash my dishes in less than 1 minute immediately after eating. It never occurred to me that how you need a machine to do such simple task, nor that it's easier to load up the dishes in it than just wash it. And when I say it, most of my (Western) friends look me as an alien. So I understand this (IMO very small increase of convenience) is important to people. Same principle applies to the smart bulbs.

> So you don't need to walk up from your bed to turn it off, as a starter.

I use a lamp by my bed for this, though I can see how that'd be harder in some layouts.

Dishwashers are not essential, but for a family it does make a difference. When you have guests, even more so.

Couple it with things like Google Home or Alexa, it gets very convenient (as long as you can live with the privacy concerns).

I have a bunch of smart bulbs and switches. When I watch a movie, I want complete darkness. My TV is located in a place where light from 7 different rooms/areas can interfere. I would have to make sure I manually turn all of them off. Now I simply tell Google Home to turn them off. This is an almost daily use case.

An even simpler one: Having certain lights come on at sunset and turn off around midnight (assuming I don't manually turn them off). When you live in the north, the sun sets early, and it sucks to come home to complete darkness. Ensuring a few key lights are on when you come home makes a significant difference.

Oh, and I like 2700K, and my wife likes 5000K. We can both have what we want. Marriage saved.

The lightbulb aisle isn't a great indicator. More expensive things tend to be over emphasized in stores due to having better margins.

I don't have any bulbs, I have been replacing light switches instead since that seemed easier to me.

I like being able to remotely turn them off. Yes I turn off lights as I go but there are others in the household and they don't necessarily listen to my preferences on that lol.

Live in an apartment and don't have dimmer switches. I like the cool colors that they make. I hate the phone app aspect.

I had one included in a home security package, and the one useful thing I found to do with it is automate it to turn on and increase brightness slowly in my bedside lamp before my alarm would ring. That was a gentle way to wake up each morning, and much cheaper than doing the same with automated blinds.

The second best use I could think of was automatically controlling outdoor lights in the evening, given that my front lights are on a different floor than my main living area. But I never really bothered with that.

I haven’t fully jumped into home automation although I would like to and have thought about it for a while. I think I would only like to have things connected to an airgapped LAN that never connects to the internet. Maybe put it on my tailscale net. This is exactly why.

You can also skip the LAN completely. Either ZigBee or zwave (or Matter if you're feeling futuristic) can be used entirely offline. There's lots of products that support those protocols for quite a while now.

IF you have an app that allows that. All of the apps I've used required a WAN connection first. One app required an immediate firmware update for the bulbs to even work. I imagined it similar to game devs releasing shiny round discs. Just put something on the disc so that it can be sent to replication in time for street date, but have it immediately for a full "update" of the code that gave the devs 6 additional weeks. I'd be amazed if there was even game code on the disc at this point.

With those devices, you shouldn't need a product-specific app. There will be edge cases and some interesting implementations which actually need the extra features of course, but in general, you should be able to connect them to a dedicated bridge device or a home-assistant server and that's it. Those can update the firmware of many devices if needed and should expose the available devices as switches / dials / colour selectors.

I mean, ideally you buy a thing, connect it to your existing controller and never see anything with the company logo or their app.

Somewhat off topic, but I bought a Philips Hue system for my house in August since the incandescent ban has made it difficult to find light bulbs. I spent some time getting the colors close to matching my incandescents with a light meter, set up some automations, etc. I could definitely tell they were LEDs (I think their R9 values are low), but they seemed... ok? I don't know, I still wasn't really loving it, but they were better than some other LEDs I had tried in the past. And some of the automations seemed legitimately useful.

Well, I got 4 ocular migraines in less than 3 days. Packed them all up and sent them back. If anyone has recommendations for LEDs that don't trigger migraines let me know. Or else I guess I'm buying a lifetime supply of incandescents and a storage unit for lightbulbs /s.

Honestly, the whole thing sort of seems like focusing on the wrong things. I've never owned a car, am vegetarian, have never lived in more than 1000 sq ft as an adult, and walk/take public transit in NYC daily. Not sure the 2 incandescent lightbulbs I use in my living room are really causing climate change.

> the incandescent ban has made it difficult to find light bulbs.

Where do you shop for light bulbs? I don’t think I’ve seen an incandescent on a store shelf for the better part of a decade now.

The Duane Reade near me always had them. Bodegas. Smaller grocery stores. I don't know, they never were hard to find here in NYC until a few months ago.

Try searching for “rough service bulbs”, I think those are still on sale

A few years ago read a review that stated IKEA led lamps (at that time) had more red (R9). You’d have to do more research to confirm.

I did buy a large supply of incandescents some 15years ago, now running out of them and starting to consider alternatives.

> Well, I got 4 ocular migraines in less than 3 days. Packed them all up and sent them back. If anyone has recommendations for LEDs that don't trigger migraines let me know.

I had the opposite. I had significantly fewer migraines after switching (originally) to GE LEDs from incandescent. I forget which product line, but they were the daylight ones and expensive.

> Honestly, the whole thing sort of seems like focusing on the wrong things. I've never owned a car, am vegetarian, have never lived in more than 1000 sq ft as an adult, and walk/take public transit in NYC daily. Not sure the 2 incandescent lightbulbs I use in my living room are really causing climate change.

I can confidently say that the general public laws about light bulb choices are not written for people who match this description.

Color Rendering Index (CRI) is the metric you care about. 95% is not good enough for the discerning user.

They mentioned R9, they know what CRI is. And more importantly to your advice, a bad R9 is common with LEDs but R9 is not used in the calculation of the overall percent.

> ...Not sure the 2 incandescent lightbulbs I use in my living room are really causing climate change...

They're not. Longevity, small profit margins, ease of entry, and bedding-down with electric franchises, all rolled into lobbying that changed politician's minds.

What happens when the electric companies here in the US see reduction in use? Profits lower, but that's okay, because they'll just petition the boards that run those energy monopolies, and our rates go up.

Had the opposite experience. I am in Europe if it makes any difference (maybe they are actually different)

For what it's worth, I use zigbee for my smart home, with a hubitat. It's connected to homekit, and it's been painless (except for the part where you have to manually add things to homekit from the hubitat).

Thread/matter promise to put this garbage to sleep, finally. The smart-home offerings from the major vendors allow all devices, without vendorlock (so far).

I wish they had chosen a name easier to search. Thread and matter are like, basic building blocks and really hard to search, even HomeKit is better, Zigbee and friends was perfect.

FWIW, I had similar experiences twice:

First with IKEA when they changed the lights on-power-up behavior on upgrade. This resulted in a hub becoming a 25 euro cc2531 stick on raspberry pi + Zigbee2mqtt and HomeBridge for integration with HomeKit.

And the past February Apple decided my Apple TV 3 was not good enough for being a home hub, and botched the entire home in the process, while I was away.

So now the whole HomeKit nonsense is out and instead there is a lightweight Rust app with a simple text file config doing both the orchestration and providing the light html UI.

https://github.com/ayourtch/homegui - in case anybody finds it useful.

As a bonus the users in the household praise the new system being much more responsive..

I am missing “turn all the lights off when last person leaves”, and full editing the colors via GUI, but not enough to bother to implement it :-)

Just stop for a moment and ask yourself "could the author of this post be wrong."

Philips just introduced Matter support which requires local access, and continues to support Apple Home as well. There are dozens of apps which can manage their hubs. ( FWIW I use iConnectHue. )

Philips also just introduced cameras, which did require them to update their EULA.

I left an App Store review expressing my disappointment and got this explanation in a response from the “developer” (relevant sentence clipped for brevity):

> To keep your accounts and products secure and ensure you get the most out of your system, you’ll need to create a Philips Hue account soon.

To make sure my account is secure, I’ll be required to have an account. Cool.

There are no announcements by Hue to developers that the CLIP API is going away, so I suspect there is a lot over speculation based on a clueless Twitter post made by some droid that most likely doesn't even understand the questions they were asked.

Lacking any believable reason for suddenly deciding my lightbulbs need an online account connected to Hue's servers, I think it's fair to assume they're eventually going to do something shitty with their online system that I could have avoided otherwise. It's happened with so many IoT platforms.

They won't announce it today, and any bad press they get this week will be long forgotten, but someday they'll come back around with some bright executive saying "You know, we could extract more value out of these lightbulb users, they've invested hundreds of dollars in our ecosystem, what're they going to do throw them all out instead of paying us $5/month?"

In all communication so far Philips/Signify has suggested that going forward

1) You will need to sign in with your Hue account even when using the app locally and

2) This will store (a copy of) all metadata in their cloud to enable you to use remote access.

Arguably this is moot if you're already using remote access but it means the Hue app and bridge will be unusuable for anyone who chose Hue because it does not store your data in the cloud. I also believe this is an attempt at consolidation to make it easier for them to support cloud-storage cameras as part of the same platform. It's still understandable why some users might object to this, especially if they have no interest in using any of the cloud features or new devices that will require it. Amazon Echo requires local access too but that doesn't mean you can opt out of Amazon storing your (meta)data in the cloud if you want to use your Echo to control Zigbee devices.

I don't think about them because mine still work fine (with a bridge connected to Ethernet) with Alexa for several years without major problems. I have 90+ total of strips, light bulbs, and such. I'm at about the limit for what one bridge can support.

The HDMI audio Sync box is a PITA that doesn't work well and doesn't support many lights. It's a $300 paperweight.

There was a periodic bug where lights would turn back on after commanded to turn off, and wouldn't stay off. That happened maybe 1% of the time but hasn't happened lately.

I also have no-brand, BT-based I2C silicone ARGB "rope" that requires an I2C fan-out repeater because only about 12 feet / 4 m could be powered serially.

You might actually need two hubs, which is why the sync box doesn’t work very well. I don’t have the sync box but I noticed the hub struggling with automations on about 60 something lights.

I now have two hue hubs, and a zigbee 3.0 controller with over 120 devices.

Easily run 8m of the best (high density, super bright which is actually too bright) RGB CCT rope light from a single zigbee controller. Perhaps its the controller and power supply you are using?

I ran copper wires to convenient locations in my house and then hard mounted manual switches to control lighting that is far away.

How do you turn them orange though on halloween?

how do you turn them on through local network?

the typical solution using wifi connected arduino servos seems like overkill.

I switched hue bulbs to zigbee2mqtt adapter few days ago, the whole thing took 30 mins, mostly because I had to factory reset all bulbs and go through dashboards and automations and replace old hue integration entities with new ones.

Zigbee2mqtt adapter picked them up right away, I tossed the hue bridge, and got rid of few cables. Amazing that it just worked. Just didn't get the hue remote to work yet because I'm lazy, worst case I can literally program anything else to interact with the lights now through HA

I'm using SONOFF Zigbee USB Dongle Plus with Z-Stack 3.x.0 Coordinator Firmware that plugs directly into RPI

Running your own Zigbee network is not that hard. I am a Home Assistant fanboy, but you can just use it to bridge your Zigbee network to Homekit without having to know how it works.

This was the plan all along. Build an ecosystem, not for value or utility, but to extract as many dollars over as many years as possible. The trillion dollar IoT market at work.

Old joke: How many engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

New joke: How many engineers does it take to enable a light bulb to turn on?

I see we've made overall progress.. 120 years should do that.

I really don't understand smart home hardware companies forcing communication through the cloud over local control. Do they think that they can get you hooked on the cloud and then charge you a monthly fee to turn on your lights?

Plus, they just pushed a Matter update which I think allows for local control. This seems like a good way to get people to sign in to setup matter and then never open the Hue app again.

Wink tried this and with little success.

It's exactly that. they think they can become a Lightbulb-as-a-Service company.

Insane.

Knowing how many people are home, when they are home, and what rooms they occupy is data that can be sold and is sold for several dollars a month. The point is to stalk you and manipulate you.

The Matter update is only for the hub to expose the devices connected to it over Matter, the bulbs themselves are still zigbee only. Better than nothing still.

Good lord, body { max-width: 600px; } why in 2023, not everyone is reading this on an iPhone, and even if some were, that's why @media exists.

To quote pg, “The aim of web design is not to use all available screen space. It is legibility. Text is most legible with no more than 70 characters per line.”

1. pg is wrong. Text is perfectly legible to me even at 200 characters per line. Different people are different.

2. Since different people are different, it makes no sense to handicap everyone just because some people have a hard time reading text that is wider than a narrow column. Make the text fill most of the window, and that way people can have the window sized to whatever their comfort level is.

This trend of super narrow columns of text is making the web worse. It needs to die.

The "70 characters per line" stuff comes from books which almost by definition are long-term reading projects involving many pages and lines.

The web ... is not that.

I wonder why, then, HN comments don't adhere to that: .comment { max-width:1215px } in news.css here on my system, which feels very readable and reasonable at around 200 chr per line at 100% scaling. I also disagree with the 70 chr recommendation: with this article, literally the entire body is limited to a very small max width which takes up between a quarter to a third of the screen on two different computers I use at home. It's a distractingly bad experience to read, so much so that I went in and modified that CSS rule just to get through it. 1200 felt right and made it a much more visually pleasing square, rather than a thin column in a sea of stark gray.

There are actual standards for this, but they're more like recommendations, and ironically https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/visual-audio-cont... recommends "Width is no more than 80 characters or glyphs (40 if CJK)." while the first line of the paragraph explaining why is 112 characters wide and looks pretty much fine / comfortable to read on my screens.

While there are psychological reasons to use shorter line lengths, as this SO answer details the whole 80 column width thing goes all the way back to punchcards in 1928 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1486...

Edit: here's what HN comments would look like with 65-70chr per line: https://i.imgur.com/yeMF6IY.png vs default with 1215px per the news.css rule: https://i.imgur.com/IXNyhfL.png .

This seems fine on desktop. Besides phone users can be biggest whiners about not being able to read some blog, article etc as it is not phone optimized. So for better or worse (IMO worse) they have established primacy on how websites should be designed or configured.

Consider something like Firefox' Reader mode, and impose your own CSS layout.

Here's my current setup (multiple narrow columns—the OP fits entirely in one screen, looks like a newspaper).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37595128

I use reader mode most of the time on my phone.

Signify, the makers of the product, are slowly but surely moving towards a subscription model, and requiring a login at all times is a first step to that. They are starting with their (stupidly expensive) security products where some functionality needs to be paid for, but they are bound to start moving other functionality behind a subscription model.

I am genuinely upset, as up until now, their lighting products have been excellent, easily better quality over alternatives in terms of physical build and capabilities. I have been a staunch Hue supporter since I first bought one of their products.

Some of the better functionality, such as the ease-in and ease-out instead of a hard on/off as well as the gradual dimming —> off for motion-sensor controlled lamps are really hard, if not impossible, to manage with the various 3rd party tools. Node-red can do a mostly-decent job, but that requires a level of work that few people are willing to invest, for results that are still not that great.

It is a real pity, but i’ll be looking for alternatives now.

I set up Home Assistant recently on a Raspberry Pi, and imported all of my Hue lights. So far so good, but I haven't managed to migrate completely off the Hue app + Bridge. I've purchased an HA-compatible Z-wave dongle, which will apparently let me manage all of my Hue hardware without an account or bridge, but haven't tried taking the plunge yet.

I hope you meant Zigbee dongle instead of Z-Wave. Hue devices use Zigbee and can be directly paired to Home Assistant using a Zigbee dongle, but not using a Z-Wave dongle.

Thanks, you're correct. It was the SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 dongle, which after a few minutes of Googling sounded like a well-supported choice for HA.

Never liked the Hue ecosystem. At some point I needed a motion sensor compatible with HomeKit. So went and got myself pretty cheap hue bridge and hue motion sensor only to find out (well, I should have done research probably) that motion sensor won't be able to paired with the bridge until at least one bulb is paired, so had to purchase cheapest bulb to get things working. it was still cheaper at the time comparing to other HomeKit only motion sensors.

I never got home assistant working, so got myself Hubitat hub (C7), which supports both Zigbee and Zwave radios and now exports them as HomeKit devices. So cheap sensors easy to pickup now are exposed to my HomeKit setup. That Hue motion sensor now directly connected to the the Hubitat and Hue bridge is somewhere in the box.

But at the time of setup, I was surprised that Hue Bridge didn't have an account. Didn't think about this until recent articles saying that account is now going to be mandatory.

though I sympathize with the frustration - I've learned just to log-in and move on, life is short so unless you want to baby around home assistant I'd go with a managed solution. more productively, the author can go with home assistant if they want to DIY. (it's ironic they suggest homekit which requires you to have and be logged into an icloud account).

the problem with home assistant is that it's easy enough to have a computer on and run the docker container. but then you have to either open ports in your firewall or use some sort of proxy in order to have outside network internet access, and then maybe your computer goes down for whatever reason. it's kind of a hassle unless you're already running a server for other things imo (and I say this as someone who runs my own surveillance with blue iris and poe cameras)

What does this look like from Philips' side?

Are they losing sales? Making money from the login somehow?

Is whoever made this decision getting patted on the back, even though its tanking sales? I think that's probably the case, otherwise they would have rolled it back some.

I've had Govee floor lamps for a while now, they seem to have feature parity with Philips Hue for 1/3rd of the price.

One of them broke, and there was a button in the app to report it. I kid you not, a replacement arrived the second day, free of charge.

That's Amazon Seller customer service. You sell a product with a 5x markup, so when your crap build quality and nonexistent QA end up shipping bricked devices or they die prematurely, you replace it for free no questions asked. People are so surprised by it that they leave glowing reviews, and that sells more product.

> If you ever saw the South Park episode where they try to get the cable company to do something on their behalf and the cable company people just touch themselves inappropriately upon hearing the lamentations of their customers, well, I suspect that's what's going on here. The management of these places are fundamentally sadists

I think it's unhelpful to think about the management of these companies this way. In my experience, assigning the most evil possible motivation to someone else is dangerous as it blinds us to the possibility that even non-evil motivations can lead to undesirable results.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

true, but these people ARE evil

Insteon is still alive for those that want something that is about device relationships first and LAN/WAN is secondary. I removed my hub years ago and still love the quality of life improvements.

They've been around since 2006.

What are you using to configure or manage Insteon devices without the hub? did you grab one of their modems or plms?

No Hub, they talk to each other EG: kitchen lights when turned on also turn on a few floor lamps and living room lights to 50%. If i double tap the switch 100% or 0% on all.

I wish I could eavesdrop on Philips' bigwigs making Hue decisions. I've got 10 bulbs bought over 6 years, each one a special snowflake with its own quirks. The latest ones need a 5-second power cut to turn on via a dumb switch. Older bulbs? Flip the switch, boom, light. Now I've got to count to five like I'm in timeout just to light up my room. Now the account requirement. Hue was honestly the best range of IoT devices I owned for some time, until they started being weird.

When you consider the fact that Hue devices are extremely overpriced compared to everything else in the market, it's even more confusing why they would feel the need to monetize user data.

Hue is so weird. They launched a rival product line and compete with themselves.

Hue is only a good product, because of the Lutron Aurora switches that I added on.

I'm convinced it's more practical over the long term to rip out all of my hue products and replace them with Lutron physical switches and normal lighting. Then your light fixtures don't have to adapt to hue, all your lighting controls work on a single platform, and Lutron is a great company that always has made great products.

This is inevitable with most "smart home" crap. Wireless-enabled appliances don't sell well unless they can (sort of-) compete with their "dumb" counterparts on price. How do you sell a complicated piece of technology at the price of a simpler device? You banish quality control and slurp up personal data. That's not a new concept to Philips or any other consumer IoT company. They're just getting better at doing it.

I imported the Hue Bar and the hub, and have never regretted a device more. It is a piece of shit, utterly stupid. You can't pair it if you forget to record the serial number. Whose design choice was that? The Alexa API cannot change colors or set themes. Smart home choices are really, really bad. I wish we could do better. Open Standards, unified interfaces, and not one app per vendor. Some of them are just reskinned. It's terrible.

Mechanical light switches, for the win. Every time.

Or if you are disabled, maybe PIR sensors like they had in the 90s.

But what we need is stronger consumer law. You should be able to buy something from a hardware store and trust it works and won't fuck with you.

Talk of running Docker in other comments is like saying "yeah you need to chemically test that cement you purchased, or go to the mine yourself, because some outlets are dodgy and the is the way it is"

Very happy to be with hubitat. It’s OSS and not user friendly, but it mostly works with most devices and once it’s running I don’t have to maintain it except to restart (twice in about 3 years)

I also like that if I did want functionality enough (Eg: graph of temperature) I could probably figure out how to write a plugin.

I really can't feel sorry for people that think it's a good idea to depend on proprietary software for their light bulbs.

Remember when "I need to reboot my phone" was a punchline for jokes about smartphones?

Now please wait whilst I reboot my lightbulbs and apply a firmware update to my toilet.

Part of the reason I won't use any of these connected products. Whatever convenience they provide is a wash for getting sucked into some bizarre future where I can't turn off my lights because an app isn't working or my internet is down.

I just put a dimmer in the wall if I need to dim lights, it’s really not that hard and works on electrical principles that won’t change when some manufacturer decides to trash the whole ecosystem. I’ve never found the need to change color temperature of lights beyond just changing the bulb.

If I really want different color temperatures in the future I think I'm just going to double the number of fixtures instead. The fancy bulbs are too complicated and (in my experience) die too regularly.

Am I missing something? Isn’t the whole point of HomeKit that you don’t need a 3rd party app? I have some cameras and they work like that, scanned the QR code and Apple does the job never downloaded the manufacturer’s app. Is it different with Philips Hue?

I feel like everything I have that supports HomeKit requires the manufacturer's app installed so that HomeKit can interface with the accessory through the app. Which always felt like it defeated the purpose to me.

Well I have some Aqara/Xiaomi cameras and never ever installed their app and I only control them through the iOS Home.app (Apple TV being the hub)

Yes it was a serious flaw in the protocol design and made the whole ecosystem worthless from the day it was launched because some short-sighted product designer prioritized quarterly growth over making something actually useful.

Doesn’t Apple require that HomeKit devices can be operated without company specific apps? Specifically to avoid this kind of situation.

Is there any effect if you aren’t using the Hue app? Or reason not to drop it (the hue app) for HomeKit?

The exact same problem occurs with Nest. It's a big shithole of abandonment.

Shelly products are (mostly) esp32 based with very open architecture. I figure in 20 years, they will either be dead or still working, no middle ground of "manufacturer went under" because the toolchain is open.

Could you not see this coming?

No. It was dark. Light switch was running firmware updates.

If only there was a person, maybe even an organisation, to preach [1] to people that proprietary software will respect their interests and freedoms temporarily at best...

Maybe they could even come up with a "Respects Your Freedom" certification program for hardware that won't screw you over.

This would achieve "freedom 4: The freedom to turn on the light".

[1] (so that they don't have to arrive there by deduction and observation)

Today, even my parents know that "you need an app to use this" is equivalent of "beware, you'll soon be screwed by this".

I quit trusting Philips when they sold one of my customers 40W LED grow bars that weren't even close to 40w. They were 15W, as measured by Kill-A-Watt directly-connected.

Philips is a lying corporation as far as I can tell.

Aren’t most light sources (unintuitively) measured by the light output of an equivalent incandescent light source? I certainly don’t expect a light labeled as a “40 watt” using anything close to that.

Grow lights are by actual power draw & generally also come with efficiency specs.

Grow lights usually draw half of their advertised power, and try to justify it by saying 'equivalent' somewhere on the box next to an asterisk.

Very few grow lights that have ever hit my hands came close to their advertised power rating. One company sold me a 50w, 135w, and 300w light set. the 50w was 45 at the wall, 135 was 75, 300 was 150.

And that's because their thermal designs are utter garbage. They can't run at full power. Most UFO lights are literally bolted to a plate, no fins of any sort, and a fan set blows down on it to cool the LEDs. If you get a rectangular panel, odds are you might get one undersized heat sink that doesn't cover the entire LED array (just the array, not the whole panel)

Most efficiency specs are garbage, too, measured with non-calibrated COTS light meters. I can toss most lights in my integrated sphere and I'll see way different from what is claimed.

Very few companies can actually be trusted. I have yet to find one with 100% honesty.

I thought home automation would be fun but gave up years ago when a sub $10 light switch costs $50+ and breaks after 12 months.

Analog light timer and fake TV for vacations are now the extent of my need for home automation.

Seems like Phillips's plan was to hook in the tech enthusiasts with prime usability, then when it became popular enough, ramp into locking things down with cloud subscriptions.

This is effectively enshittification.

> Javascript plus a "curl | sudo sh" attitude to life equals "yeah no, I am never touching this thing".

I want to understand this reference but I just don't. Can someone help me out here?

Just plain old snobbery of disliking anything written in an "inferior" language.

"curl | sudo sh" refers to the installation instructions found in many projects these days that try to make installation easier by telling users to download a setup script (curl) and then run it with elevated privileges (sudo sh). This foregoes the usual packaging systems and makes interoperability easier but some people rightly point out that this is very unsafe as it teaches users to execute arbitrary code from the web with full access to their machine. The real-world threat scenarios this actually presents are of course debatable (e.g. most of them also apply to downloadable installers in general).

The mention of JavaScript is just the usual programming language elitism. JavaScript started as a language for web programming (technically it was first used for server-side scripting before being implemented in browsers) so it's "not a real programming language" and therefore "not used by real programmers" so software using it is bad.

Of course there are alternatives to Home Assistant, like OpenHAB, which is written in Java and comes with all the UX typically associated with Java projects. It's not necessarily worse but most people would probably prefer HA's auto-discovery over OpenHAB's approach of granularly defining every single property

I have the same issue with BlackVue dashcams. One day you launch the auto-updated app - bam! Please sign in to view your recordings.

The home automation that requires one to sign in is next level, of course.

Annoyingly, the alarm app I use (Sleep Cycle) only supports Hue for some of the advanced features (sunrise lights). Despite supporting HomeKit for some stuff, the ecosystem lock-in persists.

Can't HomeKit do the sunrise stuff itself via automation?

But maybe I just triggered something in Hue for those ...

You can preprogram that sort of stuff in, but if you set alarms to irregular times, you really want the integration rather than having to manually readjust daily.

(I have a Lifx Day and Dusk in the bedroom lamp, not a Hue.)

+1. Sleep Cycle was the main reason I got into the Hue ecosystem.

It seems like they now support HomeKit scenes for waking up and going to bed, but full use of scene automations (like getting lights to fade in) requires setting up a Home Hub via something like an Apple TV or HomePod.

Some of these things had excuses, for instance the original version of SmartThings had a very stupid hub and made up for it with cloud services. That's not the case for Hue at all.

Would installing an old version of the app work? Like an APK that dates from before the time the notice started appearing or ever earlier than that.

For my fellow unfortunate HomeKit users, there’s always Homebridge, I guess. (Is siri better yet? i haven’t been home since ios17 has been out)

Is the Wyze ecosystem any good? I love their cameras and see they have a ton of cheap products like bulbs and what not.

I'm waiting for mandated electronic doors.

plus mandated "smart" tvs.

Have you been watching the minimum daily ration of "news", Citizen? Can't leave 'til you do...

There's nowhere even close to this sort of thing.

Like the places that might do it can't afford it.

The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

Personally I'm very happy with my ConBee II for Zigbee control. Just stick it in a RPi and put it with your router.

I have a few of them and it’s really sad to see how Philips is making those harder and harder to use over the years

I need a SteelSeeries account to use my mouse in any meaningful way. The war is over, and the Allies didn’t win.

is this where aliexpress comes in hand?

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004718007133.html

One of many products speaking both protocols for just 10/20$

There's an ecosystem? All they do is turn off and on on command, and change colour.

Lutron Caseta has a telnet interface via an Ethernet port.

Read as much into that statement as you want.

That used to be true. Now it speaks something called LEAP, which is a kind of JSON-based quasi-HTTP protocol over TLS. There is a python implementation (pylutron-caseta) and a javascript implementation (lutron-leap-js, which I wrote).

IoT is a giant enshittification. Sadly personal transportation, ie cars, are now IoT.

A few years ago, the Hue app was redesigned. I never did figure out how to use it.

LiFX has nicer lights in my opinion and has a mostly open protocol, by the way.

I would like to order a subscription to green lights please!

I gotta admit, I like lightbulbs that are just lightbulbs.

"But they can't make money and be open"

Thank God I bought LIFX instead of Hue.

for my next brand-new car, one which manufacturer can make without asking privacy questions nor EULA, GETS MY MONEY!

damn, hue was the only smart home thing that wasn't total bullshit and now they've changed the deal

I sympathize with the general paranoia regarding home automation dependencies but pretty much nothing about this article is accurate.

The so-called "forced" update on the Bridge is to upgrade older Bridges that are as old as 2011 or 2015. The upgrade allows this ancient hardware to leverage features of the newer generations of bulbs.

So it's a compatibility update for old hardware. So that you can buy any generation of bulb and use it with any Bridge. If anything, it shows commitment to longevity, customer convenience and the prevention of waste.

But if you're not into that, the update is triggered by means of the official Hue app, which is the sole reliable touch point by which the company can enforce/communicate anything because they have no other way of reaching you. Use any of the 100+ other apps and they will not force you to update the Bridge. And if even that isn't solid enough for you, disconnect the Bridge from the internet. Everything you own works and keeps working.

As for the upcoming update triggering you to create an account: this is because too many people have shitty network setups, connect their Bridge to the internet and then complain that their lights are hacked. Whilst this account is created online, that interaction is one-time only. What it does is to create a username and cryptographic key on the Bridge after which that authentication is fully local. Which is the exact same mechanism in use by 3rd party Hue apps for over a decade now. Many people already are using an account because this is needed for some advanced use cases like syncing with Spotify or with your TV. Not to mention that it prevents "funny" house guests from messing with your lights.

The idea that your hardware is unsafe and might be rendered useless in the future is completely unwarranted and pure misinformation. Any Bridge, any bulb, no matter how old, will keep working until the hardware itself fails. This system is a shining example of longevity.

12 years of full compatibility, an open API, hundreds of 3rd party apps, ground level Zigbee compatibility, meaningful security updates, if this is a "collapse", what would you call other systems?

And no, I do not work for Philips or Signify. But I did build software on top of their system.

What is especially interesting is how a poorly researched article has an entire community nodding along. Immediate consensus on something blatantly false.

I want to see meaningful pushback on this indefensible move of forcing customers to establish and maintain a relationship with the manufacturer in order to use the products they sell.

Other examples are: Wahoo, who locked the control of their products behind an account and login requirement for devices which had been working perfectly fine for years prior.

Roche, who killed their blood glucose app at the start of 2023 and forced all their users to move to a third party app, developed by one of their subsidiaries, which requires you to accept a data exfiltration clause, if they wish to continue the automagic on-device logging.

And many car manufacturers, right?

BMW now hides features behind signing into their absolutely atrocious online "app store." When I first got my car and was excited about exploring the features, I went through the incredible pain of logging into my account by typing my email and password with that little knob, and then one day it just logged me out and wanted me to do it all over again, and I can't be bothered so I just dismiss the dialog whenever I see it. So the upshot is they've created a set of features that aren't worth the trouble of the awful UX (and potential privacy issues), plus an occasional nag to remind me of that fact.

You also can't get a software update without installing their terrible mobile app (and logging in), so I take it to the dealer and make them do it.

Tesla has none of these issues.

Unfortunately I find Tesla's UX unbearable in other ways.

I have to admit, begrudgingly, that the Tesla App experience “JustWorksTM.” This is the 3rd I’ve picked up (3, Y, Y) and this time, I didn’t even have to pair my phone. I was signed into my existing app and my new Y just changed from an order number to a VIN and started working. All my preferences synced to my driver profile immediately.

If every experience with Tesla was like the initial buying experience I’d recommend it to anyone, however, let me assure anyone interested the honeymoon phase definitely ends.

How the fuck is it possible they don't let you do all the authentication in the app and then pair it with the car?

Maybe they do, but I don't install apps for horseshit like this. I especially don't install apps from companies that are obviously terrible at software development, like car manufacturers.

> so I take it to the dealer and make them do it.

Won't they charge you through the nose for this? We recently went to a Lexus dealer for something random but specific on an old Lexus, and they did basic service like an oil change. When we stepped inside, it was like a 5 star hotel lobby with ordurves and fancy hosts a bunch of weird junk.

We got the bill, and never even considered going back.

I had them do it when I was in for my (free) oil change, and they didn't charge me for it. I suppose they might if I brought it in for just the software update.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Sometimes when I’m updating multiple devices a day and/or trying to figure out what’s not working I think I might be happier not owning them.

Wahoo was great, the benefit to the forced app signup was that they deleted all the device settings

Good luck. I called out Logitech for forcing users to log into some bullshit online account to maintain their Harmony remotes, and was attacked by apologists on Reddit (take that for what you will).

A couple months later Logitech shitcanned the entire product line (which I had already returned after discovering their scam), and screwed all the apologists. I wonder what they think today... if they even do.

Don't underestimate the cognitive dissonance (and resulting apologism and shilling) that you'll face when you call out defects and scams in someone's pet product or belief system. And yes, it happens right here on HN too often as well.

FWIW Logitech continues to run the Harmony servers, and I've bought a couple of used hubs since. I hate that you have to login, so don't call me an apologist; Logitech made some real mistakes here. Still, the Harmony products work well enough. I hope eventually either Logitech open sources the server and database, or that someone emulates the server somehow.

> attacked by apologists on Reddit

Sometimes people get into niche communities and get really obsessive in a ridiculous way, like spending inordinate amounts of time defending a junky Logitech software suite.

I know, because it has happened to me. I see it happen with particular frequency in Discord.

I am not a psychologist, but it seems like a trap humans are predisposed to fall into.

This is what industrialization has freed us up to do.

Logitech still supports the Harmony devices, for how much longer remains to be seen. I just recently replaced some that had broke so I'm good till the next device failure as long as I don't make any major replacements either.

I know I'm part of a dwindling customer base that still uses separate A/V gear and not just built-in streaming apps and a soundbar, but it seems like there would have still been a market for competent universal remotes that you could customize.

I hated how almost every generation of their remotes got harder to use and program compared to pre-Logitech Harmony. The Touch remotes were practically unusable because you had frequently used buttons in poor locations and a touch screen that you had to scroll through to find the correct soft touch button for that wasn't especially responsive, the old models with all hard buttons were vastly more usable.

I also have separate components, and beyond that they're even in an equipment closet separated from my living room (and projector) by a wall. So I wanted an RF remote with an IR blaster I could put in the closet.

But screw it. On the rare occasion I watch something that's not on my Shield (whose remote can control my receiver's volume with CEC), I just adjust the volume manually.

But let's not even get started on the pathetic state of the A/V receiver market, where you can't even get a receiver with A/B/C sets of speakers... despite advertising three zones.

Don't use their products then? Nobody is forcing you to.

Sounds like you're suggesting "meaningful pushback" as well then.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work. If Reddit is any indication, the moral of the story is they can get away with it because there's a million idiots all ready to take your place.

I think the difference here is that Reddit wasn't bought at a retail location and you couldn't just return it to the store and get your money back.

People can and SHOULD return this garbage to the retail store the minute they get home and realized it's encumbered in this way.

except every single manufacture is going down this road pretty much, they want to monetize all that data because more money equals more better, privacy be damned.

Laws. We need the force of law protecting us when entire industries work against the public good.

What about when you already purchased a product and an automatic update moves functionality, possibly core functionality, behind their app wall?

Normally you would be able to simply continue using the firmware on it, plus the app you originally installed, in perpetuity.

In reality, on each new iOS device, Apple forces you to use the current version of the app in the App Store now, and your old version apps are not included in backups or able to be transferred to new devices.

You are eventually forced to use the latest version of the app by Apple.

The latest version of the app will require the latest firmware or will modal lock you out until you upgrade the device.

Blame Apple for not letting you preserve your old versions of working apps between backups and devices, and blame Apple for allowing time bomb expiring apps like Signal and Chase Mobile into the App Store.

Further blame Apple for not having an iOS "internet access" permission per app that would prevent these apps from learning that there are new, unwanted firmware updates available when all you want to do is local operations.

Finally, any product that requires that you "sign up/log in" on the first screen and can't be used otherwise without PII should go straight back into the box to be returned.

Fair enough. But what if you bought the product, paid a fair amount for it (i.e., you can't just shit-can it) and *then* X months later the brand suddenly require a sign up, subscription fee, etc.

Then what?

Exactly. I have hundreds of dollars tied up in MY hue products. I paid the market price for a device that didn't require me to sign up for an account.

As far as I'm concerned these companies should get hit with deceptive advertising charges. Yes, I realize that buried somewhere two or three hundred paragraphs deep in the TOS I "agreed" to let them do this. Then again maybe I didn't, because I also likely "agreed" to have the TOS changed at any time for any reason without warning. That is key here.

IMO These companies get away with this because they can toss out one of the basics of contract law. It is unconscionable that one party can _unilaterally_ change the terms of the contact (the "terms of service") without prior warning or input from the other party (me, as the purchaser of said device/service).

Basic contract law should apply here. What _tangible_ benefits are there to me

Step 1: Make discontent known to brand Step 2: Create/join community of fellow disaffected individuals Step 3: Use community to spread awareness of said dissatisfaction Step 4: Observe as sales of product fall off and brand reputation falters Step 5A: Observe as brand reverses unpopular decision and recovers OR Step 5B: Observe as brand is replaced in the market by one which better meets consumer preferences

Has this ever actually happened?

The market is littered with the corpses of companies who failed to meet consumer demand.

> companies who failed to meet consumer demand

What you claimed was a lot more specific than that. Do you have any actual examples of the specific sequence of events you claimed?

This has no actual effect on the underlying issue that nothing is stopping companies from doing this. In fact, if what you describe active ually happens a lot, it would be trivial to set up puppet competitors to your own products in order to recapture leaving costumers, repeat ad infinitum.

"it would be trivial to set up puppet competitors to your own products in order to recapture leaving costumers"

Citation needed

> Step 5B: Observe as brand is replaced in the market by one which better meets consumer preferences

Step 0A- Realize that most mature industries are incestuous. They share the same consultants, they swap employees, they compete for the same market with the same group-think mindset, etc. They all have the same incentives and paradigm for success and thus often act in murmuration'ing way. That is, they're too big and too risk-adverse to consider innovation so they feign being competitive and milk the market the best they can.

Step 0B - Realize that for the most part the gov - via Cronie Capitalism - will not protect consumers, and will put the thumb on the scale for the largest players. Your rights and privacy - in the context of Surveillance Capitalism (which the gov benefits from) - are more myth than they are real.

Step 0C - Realize that all the steps follow are rarely successful. Sure, you can try but the odds are not in your favor. You end up paying the subscription and/or having your usage data sold in some black box cyber back room.

A: I already explicitly avoid products that are encrusted in this shit. B: I have not used either of these products since their respective changes, even though they’re otherwise still perfectly functional.

A notable flow on effect is both of these products had helped with the management and improvement of my health, and these changes have had a measurable negative impact since I’ve been unable to use them.

How can you avoid products that are unilaterally and unexpectedly changed in the future? The answer is you can't.

Dunno this looks pretty safe to me https://www.lighting.philips.co.uk/consumer/p/led-bulb/87186...

Do you live in the real world or are you on a farm living off the land?

Completely useless comment.

No but I live in the amazing world of free-market capitalism where I can choose to reward whichever company best meets my preferences as a consumer with money.

I bought a Miku baby monitor because it had the features I wanted but didn’t require a subscription. It was pretty expensive ($399).

Then Miku sold to another company (they either filed or were planning on filing for bankruptcy), and the first thing the new company did was send a letter demanding $10 a month to keep using most of the monitor’s features.

Without knowing the particulars, that's an interesting example. The fact that Miku was going bankrupt suggests that they did not have a viable/sustainable business, and perhaps they could have been profitable with a different (i.e. subscription fees) business model. In either case, new company seems like they do not much value existing Miku customers, as demanding more money for a product that was bought/paid seems pretty outrageous.

They pushed out an over the air update the bricked nearly every device and had to swap them all out right before sending out a letter warning they were going to file.

The lesson that it drives home to me is that if a company can force updates to your device, it doesn’t matter what the terms of service are or how much you trust the company.

They can go bankrupt, sell off the assets, and some new vampire company can come along and remove your ability to use your product.

> if a company can force updates to your device

Worse, if your device requires remote services then they can control access to those. Stallman was right.

It was marketed directly based on 'no subscription fees', and had a heftier price to boot. So they're having their cake and eating it too.

Your first mistake was buying a baby monitor where it was even possible for most of its features to be remotely disabled unless you paid a fee. If you give someone else control over your devices, and your data, they'll eventually take it.

There was no alternative for a baby monitor with the features I was looking for.

In general it’s getting harder and harder to avoid devices where this is possible. The obvious answer is regulation.

Oh hey, fellow Miku friend. I was _furious_ when they first announced their bankruptcy plan. We supposedly paid a hefty premium for hardware that enables onboard breathing monitoring, and suddenly they're pretending they have to ship it to the cloud to do some magic? Nah, tear it down, and turns out we did pay extra for hardware.

Our Miku's use a Novelda (fka Xethru) UWB sensor SoC, specifically designed for human presence monitoring and, drumroll, breathing and heartbeat. Specifically they use an X4: https://novelda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/x4_datasheet_...

I likely won't have time, what with the kids and all, but I'm going to give it the old college try to tear into this thing and craft some firmware so we can actually keep things from being a paperweight. It blows my mind this isn't just table stakes with IoT crap these days, but here we are.

Ring doorbells, because the microphone heard the citizen say the N-word and locked him out of the Amazon account.

Back then, we thought legal questions about discrimination silly - if the baker won't bake cakes for lesbians, who cares, there are dozens of bakers in town who are not silly, why fight with the one who is, especially since the only recourse you will get is a birthday cake.

But now with the app monopolies it's different. If Lyft bans you over a justified chargeback and Uber bans you over another justified chargeback you are going to have a problem.

Not what happened. The driver thought they heard the nword come from a Eufy doorbell. Which was them mishearing the automated response. No person uttered an nword and no ring doorbell was involved.

Amazon did lock the guys account for the report from their driver. That did lock him out of his other IoT devices.

The thing is - even racists have a right that their devices work. They paid money for it. Amazon's duty is to protect their driver, and if they refuse to deliver because a driver has been threatened that's OK. But they can't lock him out of their alarm system or automated door opener. It's worse because when you choose a camera doorbell because you have a choice between Ring and Nest, which is not much of a choice.

Sure, but your original post made this man to be out as a racist. He isn’t.

There are other doorbell choices, like Eufy by Anker. The one this man used.

The point is that Amazon has no business locking even racists out of their Amazon account.

Why doesn't freedom of association extend to Amazon? I'm pretty sure they argue they have the right in the EULAs the racist accepted.

There need to be reasonable limits as companies are not actually literal people, and their rights should be inferior to those of literal people. Treating companies as people and anything they do (eg in the lens of speech) has caused so much damage and has obviously just been an excuse for lawmakers to not have to make tough decisions.

An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.

Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.

This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.

Eufy by Anker lied about their products storing data locally and instead uploaded it to their servers — and had them unsecured so anyone could download anyones videos.

As people who understand these things, we can choose the role of "citizen technologist", to benefit society.

Some off-the-cuff ideas of how:

1. Make our own purchases "on principle", and hope that enough other techies do that, that economic pressure is applied to brands.

2. Make our own non-purchase technology adoptions "on principle".

3. Inform other techies, both on specifics of individual devices/architectures/vendors/etc., and to bring everyone up to speed on the basics (e.g., reasons for open standards, user-oriented products/services, avoiding lock-in, privacy-respecting, responsible security, etc.).

4. Inform non-techies, such as by pointing them at solutions in their interest, and in the interest of society.

5. Advise lawmakers, to complement whatever they're hearing from lobbyists.

6. Contribute code and other effort to open platforms, and actually use them.

7. Be careful about helping to prop up society-hostile platforms, such as by using them to the exclusion of something else, making them more palatable to the exclusion of something better, implicitly endorsing them, etc.

8. Keep principles a factor in who we go to work for, how we work while there, and whether we stay there.

These are great ideas, that a tax paying citizen should not be burdened with in a first world country. Our administration needs to step up from hiring dinosaurs, to actually hiring technology-competent legislators that can compose effective legislation.

I’d question whether our techie peers can be bothered to care about these principles. IME most are too complacent.

Samsung did something similar with their phones' built I'm heart rate and oxygen sensor, and health related metrics from the accelerometer

My Samsung Galaxy S8+ had those sensors and I used them often for many years. The results were interesting and useful, and graphed with history in the Samsung app which shipped on the device.

Then one day they changed the terms so you had to create and sign into a Samsung account, and upload your health data, to continue using the sensors.

I didn't accept those terms so I wasn't able to use those health monitoring functions on my expensive device any more.

Interestingly, most articles I saw about the change portrayed it as a good thing, that you could now have consistent healrh sensor records across your devices and other good cloud features, even portraying it as an oddity that Samsung Health didn't require Samsung cloud integration all along and that they had finally caught up to the times. But it already had those features before the change! The only visible change was to to remove the choice to opt out of uploading your personal data.

samsung takes horrible liberties with all their products, not only phones but things like televisions and even refrigerators.

> Javascript plus a "curl | sudo sh" attitude to life equals "yeah no, I am never touching this thing".

I get why there are people that don’t like how some installers do this, but this trope is really turning into the “but I don’t even own a TV” of OSS commentary.

Just use the Docker image if you don’t like it. Or get their appliance which actually supports ongoing development.

Agreed. Another alternative: run HAOS in a VM.

I don't like how HAOS is the only currently-supported way to use the SkyConnect to get Zigbee + Matter support currently, and messing with firmware on the SkyConnect was exactly the opposite reason why I got one in the first place. It doesn't "just work", even for just ZigBee, and now I've sunk hours into troubleshooting it without a working ZigBee setup in HA. Meanwhile, the Sonoff ZigBee bridge worked flawlessly the first time setting it up with my phone and their eWeLink app.

Smart Home 2023Q3 status: still for hackers only if you want more than a few lightswitches that you can just toggle from your phone, and even if you do want that, stick to one vendor + system only.

After a few days with ZigBee I was ready for an extended vacation. Finally got rid of the whole thing and everything is on a dedicated WiFi network now that is an integral part of the house, in other words: if I sell this house that WiFi network + all HA stuff goes with it including a nice manual of how it all hangs together.

Highly recommended: Shelly gear, it is easy to configure and seems to be rock solid, I've got a bunch of their remote control radiator valves, several remote control relays and a tri-phase consumption/production meter. It all worked flawlessly since installation. And instead of a regular Pi I got one that was built into a keyboard. It was mostly because I couldn't get a bare one but in the end I think this was the better option.

> if I sell this house that WiFi network + all HA stuff goes with it including a nice manual of how it all hangs together

I had something similar. Rock solid. Wired back haul. Nice manual. I knew it wouldn’t add $$$ to the house but I was a little surprised to find out it actually put a lot of people off. It had negative value as I had to rip it out and go analog.

Even nerds looking at the house wanted to do their own thing not maintain someone else's ideal and normies refused to spend ANY mental energy on understanding it.

Was eye opening!

That could well happen, so, for that eventuality I have a little cardboard box with the old radiator valves and thermostat. The solar panels and the inverters would be a bigger issue though, this all runs locally, not in the cloud (it was a bit of a job to find inverters that do not require a cloud connection, what a nonsense that is). But given that altogether these give the house its A++++ energy label (it is in the top .1% or so for houses of this size and age with respect to energy consumption) I'm pretty sure that buyers would be A-ok with it. Energy efficiency is a massive factor in people's buying decision here (as well as location and general state of the house, obviously).

But your point is well taken and I'll be sure to introduce the subject at the handover if it ever comes to that.

Ah well you are in good shape then.

Energy efficiency was my main goal too but no one gives a fuck about that here either so it’s a different market.

Here it's a mandatory disclosure item and it's important enough that you can filter by it on the real estate listing sites. More so because now house insulation comes with a mandatory 'bat study' requirement which is absolutely bonkers. So houses that are already energy efficient are at a premium.

What also helps is that the whole system runs without any user intervention. The manual is mostly aimed at people hired to add stuff at some point in the future, or in case something breaks.

Recently set up HA with a Zigbee dongle, took less than 15 from zero (newer used HA before) to be able to control my dimmer, most of that time was spent on finding my USB device path in /dev. Connect the usb dongle, start docker container, initial HA setup, find my Zigbee device and done.

Wait a few months. My HA Zigbee integration works great… most of the time. Sometimes it loses all the devices and I have to reboot. Never found the time to dig into why.

Can’t confirm, the only issues I’ve had were with Deconz, since switching to Zigbee2MQTT (using the same ConBee stick) there have been no issues whatsoever.

Consider migrating to a different channel.

How do you do that? While I love Home Assistant… intuitive it isn’t.

If you know where to find the mesh view of your zigbee network, the one that has all of the links between the nodes rendered using bezier curves, at the bottom of that page there are three icons. The first icon is called Network, and if you view that page there should be an option for editing the channel That the zigbee network is on.

Tapping that option should bring up a dialogue that lets you migrate to a different channel with a warning about how some devices may not automatically migrate and will need to be removed and re-added if so.

Give it some time. And add a few devices ;)

But congratulations on getting it to work.

I definitely have a small setup, but getting ZigBee running was fairly straightforward. Two steps: 1) buy a ConBee dongle and 2) install and setup Zigbee2MQTT.

I’ve never dealt with Matter, though.

You can get ZigBee with any number of adapters (I'm using HUZBZB-1), and Matter right now is not worth it anyway.

I bought a SkyConnect adapter to support HAOS, but it's probably going to be unused for at least another year.

+1 for the HUZBZB-1. I waxed more poetically about my setup already[1], but I've had that little guy for over 4 years, it was plug-and-play on day 1, and I've never had a single issue with a Zigbee or Z-Wave device. (Wi-Fi? don't even get me started...)

And yeah, it'll be another year or two before Matter/Threads really starts picking up steam. I'll just pick up a new dongle when there's 10 of 'em in that same timeframe.

(Disclaimer: my house is 800 sqft and I don't share any walls with neighbors. Zigbee is SUPPOSED to be mesh and Just Work assuming you have enough devices, but I can't speak from experience on that front.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266

I think if you stick with Homekit certified accessories you can probably have a multi-vendor setup that's OK. Homekit can be flaky at times, though, and I would definitely recommend Home Assistant instead if you are a hacker.

I bought a cheap ConBee (is that what it’s even called?) Zigbee USB dongle, plugged it in, passed it through to my HA container, and it’s flawless. Plenty of things you can knock HA for, but good ZigBee support is easily attainable. I have…a large setup. 30 lights, door locks, ZigBee switches, blah blah blah. And I’m not smart guy. Such an improvement over WiFi

This is even better than the docker version, because it's able to set up a bunch of stuff for you that you'd have to do manually with docker, like the current ZWave integration.

Yea; I run HomeAssistant via the official Docker container and have been pretty happy with it. It's only accessible on my local network, and my phone/laptop/etc use Wireguard to talk to it if I'm somewhere else.

Just installed that, myself. Same way. Instantly worked. Kicking myself for not installing this sooner, it's pretty rad.

Once you’re kind of settled there take a look at NodeRED. Integrates really cleanly with Home Assistant and for most of the kinds of people on HN that are already technically inclined, it makes much more complex automations and integrations a piece of cake.

Yep this is how I'm doing it. Combined with ESPHome I've got a nice, local-only automation system using sourceable off-the-shelf parts (but I'm so, so happy that Athom are making open-source flashed IoT devices - which go and live on my IoT network).

Note that you don't need the Community Store if you're running HA via Docker.

Every plugin that is in that store must have a custom_components folder.

Drop that into the bind-mounted volume holding HA's configuration.yaml and restart. HA will pick it up automatically, and you'll be able to install it in Integrations and Devices.

Also, no one’s forcing you to pipe curl into sudo sh. I don’t think a software project listing this as an installation method is that big of a red flag to be honest.

I’ve … never piped curl for home assistant.

Yeah, you could always just curl it first and see what it’s going to do.

It can be detected if your adversaries are clever enough: https://lukespademan.com/blog/the-dangers-of-curlbash/

Congrats, you just defeated the attack by manually downloading the script before running it!

Tbh, I’m put on more on alert by the spelling errors in the linked post than I am by the ostensible threat of a server timing my requests in order to serve malware.

It’s good practice to check anything that you’ll pipe to `sudo`, but this article’s level of paranoia is kind of self-defeating, no?

At some point, we all trust the things we run on our machines. We rely on communities — and our participation in them — to vet installations.

There is no perfect solution. Someone will always be misled.

Why is "sudo" emphasized so heavily, anyway? Running as your ordinary user, that shell script can send someone your session cookies, authenticate with your SSH agent, and really anything that you can do. Sure, maybe not running as root protects the integrity of the OS and prevents some persistent keylogging attacks, but honestly... you don't need a keylogger when you just grab the cookies, or install your own binaries farther up in the path (good old ~/.local/bin/firefox instead of /usr/bin/firefox).

Frankly, being anything other than super paranoid is almost a little reckless.

Also, shit-talking Home Assistant is a pretty weird take. I wouldn't write it in Python configured half in YAML and half in SQLite either, but ... not having to write it myself was the fun part.

This is basically https://xkcd.com/1200/

Anyone who really complains about curl | sudo is just doing it for nerd points, because I guarantee you they happily install all sorts of other software without "vetting" it.

And if someone caught someone doing trickery it'd be big news.

Yup. It’s very “fake nerd” energy.

Rachel isn't a fake nerd though

Someone can be "real" and still have bugaboos that are just not really worth it.

There are those of us who are security minded and will in fact download the script and check the sha1/sha256 and review the script before running it. Any time I see this curl sudo thing is when there's always another (manual) option. The shell scripts themselves aren't so complex that you can't figure out what they're doing, they're normally fairly straightforward, unless they were generated by some tool, or are in fact malware, so you can see if something looks funky before you run it. Sure, there can be a malware that makes it so you can't tell, but normally not.

It's all a web of trust.

If I don't trust the website to do curl | sudo bash then why do I trust the software that I would eventually install?

Even the old argument of "middleware devices modified the script en-route" is mostly removed by HTTPS everywhere.

And there are people like you who actually look at the script (and the compiled code, too!) to find things, because if they do find something in a script as big as HomeAssitant, they'll be famous.

I don't use any of this home automation junk, but this kind of begs the question - why would such an app need root access to your devices in the first place?

To allow a web server to bind to port 80 is the only thing that really comes to mind.

Yeah, that's a conceivable use case for a dedicated box, I guess. But why would that be necessary (or desirable?) Seems like opening port 80 would be the last thing you'd want a home appliance to do... lol

80 is desirable because it’s the default port of web browsers and means you can just visit the DNS or up address & not have to remember to tack on some arbitrary port number. Or use some sort of proxy if setup.

And there’s nothing wrong with using port 80 security wise. Binding a port doesn’t mean you’re opening it on the firewall for the world to see. Plus if you’re opening some port on the firewall, what port you use doesn’t matter - it’ll be scanned by an automated scanner shortly regardless of port.

The downsides of choosing port 80 for your all-important lightbulb dimmer switch telemetry are that:

1. browsers don't even attempt encryption,

2. the port could be open to the world, and

3. lots of people are already running more meaningful shit on port 80.

Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.

[edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house. What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?

What kind of schmuck does this to his house??

1. OK, but it's a LAN - who cares. It's either that or you're in self signed cert hell anyway.

2. If that's the case you have major issues going on which are irrelevant to the port chosen

3. On a single IP - so what? Every device can open it's own port 80 on your LAN without any conflict

> Seriously, you want to sell me a lightbulb that needs root access and then opens an unencrypted port and then makes outbound calls...? Are you nuts? That's beyond lazy design. It's almost like an intentional insult.

This doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about a single light bulb or actual orchestration software? Both need to communicate to actually do anything.

> edit] If you set up a home service on your local network, surely you can also bookmark the obscure port number next to the 128/ address in front of it. The only purpose served by turning your light bulbs into a beacon from hell on port 80 would be letting strangers totally penetrate your house.

This also doesn't make any sense. There is no reason a device on your local network listening on port 80 makes it a 'beacon from hell' - because again, listening on LAN & WAN are 2 very different things. And the port it's using has 0 bearing on security.

> What happens if you start up a webserver? Do the lights go off?

Absolutely nothing - because again there is no conflict with different devices on your LAN using the same ports to listen on.

You're mixing up a number of different things here & making issues where there aren't any. A device on your network opening port 80 doesn't magically make it accessible to the world for poking & prodding or result in any conflicts that cause things to stop working.

And when it comes to orchestrators like Home Assistant - you can choose any port you so desire. But changing the port doesn't make it any less or more secure.

Shit gets complicated, and being able to dynamite a railroad track through a mountain of nuance is just easier.

"Oh, that path is actually not a temp directory and requires permissions different than the user account?" - sudo

"Oh your firewall blocks my outgoing telemetry data?" - sudo

"Oh your firewall blocks my localhost request but I don't actually realize that's what happens but when I try it with sudo it just works everywhere?" - sudo

There are myriad reasons apps want root access, and almost none of them are good reasons, but that doesn't mean it's not simpler for them to get sudo from a user than it is to get dev eyes addressing (let alone understanding) the nuance.

Why the hell does telemetry need to allow inbound connections?! Running as root for that reason is even more offensive than what I had figured.

I'm not sure why I'm getting downvotes here... is there some cult of people who love installing apps with root privileges?

I think the downvotes might be because I specifically said outbound connections? Although if you have IoT devices it's not unreasonable that they should be able to initiate conversations with your other devices (that would then need permission to accept inbound connections from your IoT devices).

Or maybe the downvotes are because everything I was saying was conjecture / hypothetical anyway, and you're now asking a more specific question to the general question being answered.

I thought the question was "why do apps that don't need sudo request sudo?" And my answer was "perhaps because it's easier to fix permissions problems by getting permission for everything than it is to get them by understanding why your app is getting blocked by them in the first place." Whether it's inbound or outbound or taking video surreptitiously doesn't really answer the question of "why, if the app doesn't actually need it?"

At any rate, I don't actually know why because I don't ask for permissions that I don't need. I also don't know why you're getting downvotes as I didn't downvote you: this answer, like my previous one, is speculative, as is somewhat inevitable when trying to answer "why" questions that relate to the motivations of others.

For the record, I thought your original answer was excellently well constructed. The bulldozer analogy is completely recognizable to anyone who's tried to engineer any software that needed to run a local server and somehow get its data out. Geez why didn't we all think of forcing the user to run it as root? /s

Maybe more interestingly: I do think that the motivations of others are totally calculable. Society is an autocomplete. One big honkin LLM replete with all the hallucinations. Pretending to be a member of this society is to pretend that I wish to better understand why I'd be downvoted for a thought - to pretend that it's just me, a neuron, looking for back propagation. Yay for the neuron.

Nevermind, it's not important anyway. (Life).

Can a "regular" installer do all of that? Especially if it asks to escalate its privileges?

"Running a software installer" in general seems just as insecure as "sudo | curl" whatever.

Surely these are the same kinds of people who will carefully review all scripts before running them, right?

people act weird around any kind of script, more-so than executables, i've never really understood it.

I periodically get told that a published browser userscript of mine is malicious or suspicious in emails simply because of the cautions and wording around the userscript installers themselves (it's just a css tweak, a theme), meanwhile the executables I have in the wild have generated zero similar feedback.

my theory is that since the script is more easily read that it attracts people to read it without any theory or knowledge of what they're even looking at .

This feels like a thing but I can’t think of a name for it.

Where something that can be verified gets more scrutiny than something that can’t.

Maybe someone else knows.

Verification bias?

"bikeshedding"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect

Absolutely. And just to be sure, I also check file checksums, which I've downloaded from same server over the same connection.

Even if you don't review it before running it, after

  $ curl https://whatever/foo.sh > foo.sh
  $ sh foo.sh

if something goes terribly wrong you can examine foo.sh to try to figure out what happened and how to fix it. Even if foo.sh managed to delete itself you can just grab it again.

After

  $ curl https://whatever/foo.sh | sh

if something goes wrong and you then try

  $ curl https://whatever/foo.sh > foo.sh

to get a copy of the script to examine a malicious server can tell that you aren't piping to a shell [1] and give a non-malicious script.

Since it takes an insignificant amount of effort to defend against this why not get in the habit of doing it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17636032

Actually they do. Not individually one by one themselves but they outsourced this to their distro maintainers which do a spectacular job.

I'll take a properly curated package in flatpak Fedora repos over a random script downloaded and piped into a root shell any day

Right? I felt stupid for having read the rest of his post when I saw this nonsense and I closed the tab.

> his

Her. Rachel is a woman. Pretty knowledgeable and experienced, too, so I would at least consider what she's saying.

I mean, what do you think the installer is doing anyway?

  tiny_installer.sh

  #! /bin/bash
  curl www.url-you-didnt-check.dev/the-real-installer.sh | sudo bash -

And what does OP think a ton of commercial installers do? Half of them just download an archive and unpack it.

Yes, exactly the point I was trying to make. curl | sudo bash is just making it obvious what the glossy GUI installer with its dialog boxs and animated progress meters is doing anyway.

Yeah, the industry has settled on it's fine with some caveats.

Even Microsoft has this published for the dotnet install tool:

  curl -sSL https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh | bash /dev/stdin <additional install-script args>

Microsoft.. The only company I have ever heard mention CRIME and BREACH and invokes their specter in .Net to do awesome things like.. Not let you enable websocket compression in SignalR.

Of course Microsoft is fine with it - the official Windows way of installing things has forever been "Pssst, hey there, why don't you download this .exe and run it and keep pressing ok until it's done"

How is this much different than how a deb or something gets installed? Actually, Windows installers are expected to be signed by default and it'll warn you if they aren't.

I wasn’t even aware this was a supported installation method anymore. If it is, it’s hidden on the site. When was the author’s last experience with homeassistant?

If the answer to cloud enshittification is “I know! I’ll use a different company’s solution instead of this open source project because I want to make an outdated stand against curl|bash” then I think the thought process is misguided.

HomeAssistant has changed officially supported installation methods so much, I personally don't know what's supported. Docker, tarball, installer, their own OS Part 1, etc were all different ways you can run it.

Last I checked, the bare metal pip3 method was "always" going to be supported. So the "Just use Docker" comments ignore this.

The author complains about a lack of product leadership at Phillips, but HA has always been renown for ignoring their users.

HAOS has been a pretty good experience when I set it up at my parents house though. I don't begrudge HA from trying to figure out the most reliable way to support installation methods - they're in a complicated space, and techies like us do tend to build unique-snowflake home setups.

I'm running the docker container (since I already had a home server running docker containers), but a NUC with HAOS for my folks has been working great.

I do begrudge them for putting in placeholders for features for years that weren't functional. Like a map that was blank and entire sections that weren't functional. I also begrudge them for doing things like removing Python 3.7 support 1.5 years before it was EOL. I begrudge them for re-architecting entire features like Open Z-Wave three times over the five years I used them. I begrudge them for asking their projects be removed from other open source projects.

HA is one guy's pet project to goof around with the latest and greatest technologies.

I put HAOS on an RPi4, plugged in a Zigbee/Z-Wave adapter, and never looked back. It runs 15ish Sengled RGB bulbs wonderfully, I've got all sorts of lights macro'd and timer'd (e.g. porch light comes on at sunset, turns off at midnight). Reliability is crazy, the UI is wonderful, I can access it from all sorts of devices and native apps...and there's a few other devices it sucks in too (air filter, Chromecasts, my NAS health, etc.) Now I haven't done any of the other actually useful projects I have in my backlog (thermostat, motion sensors, security cameras), but I'm extremely confident that HA can handle any that I throw at it.

All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)

Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.

But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.

Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!

I've never understood this.

Sure, don't do that as is - But it's not hard to just curl the script, read it to confirm it looks okay, then run it.

Has anyone actually been hacked by a curl|bash installer because of the curl-bash-iness of it (and not a theoretical PoC--I'm well aware of those blog posts)?

Maybe I’m just a naive idiot, but I thought her point was not the danger of sudo’ing random shell scripts per se but any sort of “solution” to restore the prior capabilities of a consumer product that required that level of technical acumen.

But every single other reply seems to be either “well yeah obviously read the script first” or “how dumb, just use docker,” so like I said, maybe I’m the dumb one.

I mean its really putting all the onus on the buyer of the product in the hopes that they have technical capabilities or alternatively just stilling all the benefits to the corporate company. Sad state of play.

I think her point is that managing your home automation through this level of involvement is not the end goal she’s looking for. I may be wrong, but it sounds like she wants stuff to plug in and work without having to go down the road of setting up custom automation stitching stuff.

I love Home Assistant, but I regularly find myself opening the Hue and Lutron apps anyway. And I’m someone who runs a NUC. I don’t mind administration, but I don’t want to HAVE to do that when I’ve already paid for a thing that supposedly does most of that.

This enshittifcation is endemic. Corporations cannot just release a good product and support it. The better the product is and the larger the customer base becomes, the higher the likelihood that some business planner is going to see dollar signs and try to squeeze the product for everything it’s worth. And every time this ruins the product. And we’re here with a proprietary phone OS and proprietary apps. Proprietary firmwares on proprietary hardware. And we are completely at the whim of these companies.

And the option is what, buy a Zigbee dongle and a raspberry pi run some code written by unpaid enthusiasts? 3D print a case for it and mount it on the wall, running updates and fixing it ever few months when some package update breaks it?

I like the concept of lights that run from an app. I don’t have any of the physical Hue switches for my system and it’s fine. But I do not want an app that abuses me, and I do not want to maintain some fragile project made from slapped together code. I want robust open hardware with open source software.

I’m convinced that we can achieve this, but it won’t be with the current model of business and engineering we have today.

I agree with this.

I intentionally buy switches not bulbs or more complex gear. Then you plug your dirt cheap LED dumb bulb into the lamp and have it turn on and off with your voice. Much cheaper to replace when the bulb eventually burns too.

Its stupid simple, just make sure everything connects to your assistant of choice (Hey Google / Alexa / Siri - maybe?) OR just stay in one company's walled garden and you're fine. Personally I'm a fan of Wyze's hardware but don't use their apps or more complex cameras.

> OR just stay in one company's walled garden and you're fine

Google wants to have a word with you about some of the products it's sold and quickly killed.

yeah i've been in the google/nest garden for years ... yes the dual apps are weird and that's probably because Google Home does too much already that they had to keep the Nest app but nothing has stopped working for me nor gotten any emails telling me they are sunsetting something.

back in April, Google announced cancellation of several home products. dont know if they sent an email but they have a blog post.

> starting April 8, 2024 support will stop for Nest Secure

> stop support for Dropcam starting April 8, 2024.

> we will officially end Works with Nest as of September 29, 2023.

https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Blog/An-update-for-ou...

3rd party "Works with google home" stuff will often stop getting updated causing more and more functionality to break over time. Admittedly this is an issue you can avoid by entirely buying the products actually made by Google, or at least carefully selecting third parties, but a huge amount of smarthome stuff is going to be rendered non-functional because of this sort of thing.

I do think the 1st party Google Home stuff is supported well enough, and I don't think any of Google's competitors in the smarthome space are really offering anything that's obviously more compelling. I mostly recommend people either go with big brands or something that can be flashed with tasmota, pick your poison.

Fair enough, I've generally gone with cheaper lower end products and some of them EoL, some die, but I write that off as a nature of playing with more little computers than my ancestors could have ever imagined.

It probably is important to note that like many modern tech systems, they aren't "hands free" automation. Patches come out, things desync from the network, etc.

How do you get color and dimming features with that setup?

wyze color bulbs works with Google Home and supports everything the app supports

That is one thing Wyze doesn't have: A dimmer.

I use: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N106YN7 then connect the Leviton dimmer to Google Assistant for voice routines crossing different app gardens.

I don't use colored lights, but you could use smart bulbs or fixed colored lights controlled via smart plugs depending on your use case. Or just get something with built in multi color, like LED strips.

There are some LED strips that maintain programming thru powering off, just like how oil radiators with physical switches maintain settings thru powering off. These devices work great with smart plugs, and in the case of an oil radiator can be hooked up to a smart thermostat for a cheap man's smart home, fully portable for moving or apartment swapping.

I can do a longer write up if you're curious.

Easier to keep in sync in the physical and virtual world, plus you don't lose connection if you turn off the switch like a smart bulb.

I observed this enshittification happen at my tech company. When we were smaller, the C-Suite bent over backwards to keep the product good and sane.

Then they went public. This attracted a lot of new managers and ladder hoppers.

As a public company, the board, the C-Suite, the immense layers of management all were incentivized to boost stock prices to boost their own compensation.

They did this ethically during the low interest rate environment. But with higher interest rates, the only way to maintain growth is via scummy nickel and diming.

So execs and all the management layers do nothing but enshittify the product so that the gravy train can continue for at least a few more quarters.

Thus, customers are left hanging with shitty products.

Imo, the solution is to never buy long-term subscriptions from public companies with listed stocks, if possible.

If you think public companies are bad, wait until you look at the track record of companies bought by private equity or hedge funds. :s

> But with higher interest rates, the only way to maintain growth is via scummy nickel and diming.

Or they could just charge more for new bulbs as the bulbs burn out. Why ruin the user experience? Just charge me an extra dollar and move on.

> Why ruin the user experience? Just charge me an extra dollar and move on.

That's risking losing you as a customer. Turns out, a lot of customers think our services are already too expensive.

Why would interest rates be the factor here? Some of the highest interest rates historically was during the time that some of the best, most reliable products were born?

> Why would interest rates be the factor here?

The projected growth of revenue is not likely to materialize with higher interest rates. Investors will not invest in the stock as compared to the risk free 5% from US treasuries. So the stock will likely not grow any longer. More likely to flatline or collapse.

This makes the paper billionaire CEO a mere hundred millionaire, which is unacceptable.

You have to work even harder to attract investors in a high-interest-rate environment. Equity and bond returns must beat safe investments like Treasurys, or no one will invest in them.

The Home Assistant team has a full company behind them, and they sell cloud services for the app for people who want it. Zigbee2MQTT has 113 sponsors. If you run them both with docker then updating is pretty simple with no package breaks.

I do get your point though. Fixing the lack of a privacy focused option that works well for people who aren't familiar with systems administration would be nice.

“If you run them both with docker then updating is pretty simple with no package breaks.”

Do you realize how insane this sounds for non-technical people who want to turn on a light in their livingroom?

Your grandma doesn’t know how to run containers as k8s services?

Don’t tell me she still manually SSHes to each box to run the apps in the background using nohup?!

Grandma's still rocking the automation through the power lines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm33KB2Th9M&t=680s

Hey, don't laugh! Literally last week I dug out my old X10 kit and set up my new office with it and a 25 year old remote that only needed new batteries. Still got the serial port dongle somewhere too in case I need to strap it to a Pi :)

Granny’s got Ansible, been treating em like a herd since way back using ssh.

Man if only there was another way to turn on lights.

Hmmm, NFC tag paired to the light that you can tap with your phone to turn it on/off?

Non-technical people shouldn't do home automation. Unfortunate, but it's true. The entire market is just ewaste.

> If you run them both with docker then updating is pretty simple with no package breaks.

This is a lie.

> This is a lie.

Is it possible that it’s simply incorrect? There’s a difference.

They also make appliances, so it is as simple as buying a home assistant yellow and pairing it to the lights.

Why can I trust Home Assistant?

It's completely open source, so you can run it yourself. I've read through a lot of the code and have contributed to it- it's pretty well organized.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. Philips' revenue was ~20 billion last year. Why must these people shit all over everything to squeeze out even more on top of that?

Where are all of the businesses with values that put humans first? Is it just necessary to be so ruthlessly destructive to make it at all?

Duty to shareholders or whatever the standard excuse is.

That’s a lie that the execs tell. Yes, they do have a duty to the shareholders, but the lie is that they are allowed to exercise their reasonable business judgement, which actually gives them very broad latitude to determine what’s in the shareholders interest.

The execs could easily argue that in their business judgement it’s in the shareholders best interests if they make a long term play, and chose to forego maximizing profits in the short term, and instead maintain positive customer goodwill in the interests of maximizing profits over a longer time span.

As long as they can provide some plausible reasoning behind their decision, they’re safe.

So, the “I have to maximize shareholder value” argument is… on the surface true, but hides a ton of autonomy and decision making power that the executives have.

About ten years ago, an activist investor tried to get Apple to reduce their green stance, in favor of profit. They wanted Apple to commit to only working for profit and shareholder return.

Tim Cook got visibly angry at them, and told them that it was a core principle, and there was no way that Apple would compromise on it.

Say what you will about him, but he has personal reasons for valuing privacy, and he knows that compromising one core principle, in favor of profit, will inevitably lead to compromising customer information.

Looks like he made the right call. Apple is closing in on $3T.

Tim Cook also acted from a place of strength. That was one investor, and Apple was (and still is) rolling in more money than it quite literally knows what to do with.

I wonder if Tim Cook could get away with it if margins were slimmer, and Apple wasn't the most ludicrous cash making machine since Standard Oil.

Thats my worry, when Apple (and they very well may, who knows) takes a dive, eventually, at some point in the future, will they start selling off the farm?

There’s two questions:

“Could get away with it” in terms of “would he be liable for a lawsuit for failing to meet the duty to shareholders”, probably not as long as he could article a reasonably justifiable reason his actions were in the shareholder interests, that isn’t directly contradicted by evidence.

“Could he get away with it” in terms of “would shareholders fire him?” maybe not. Depends on the shareholders, I guess.

It’s not just that.

Philips’ “managers” are screwing up many of their historic product lines and then discontinuing them when the margins go negative.

HN is filled full of money and well-connected engineers.

There are hundreds of people on this site that can begin creating a competing company/product line starting tomorrow if they care to.

It's exceptionally difficult, expensive, with a high risk of failure. And it'll properly take years of your life even if it fails. No small order for sure.

> Where are all of the businesses with values that put humans first?

A lot of them start out that way, while they're still founder owned/controlled. The enshittification is a market opening, if someone dares to pursue it.

Not only that, there are many of us that are contributing to the problem and are willing to hand wave it away because of the pay and the freedom that comes with it.

(Not you and me, though, we have principles, right?)

A large chunk of the HN crowd of course, we work for big tech companies or heavily capitalistic private enterprises. not you and me though! ;)

Does Philips the main corporation still own Phillips hue? I thought they sold off the brand or at least the rights to the brand?

Philips spins off subsidiaries like a spider does webs. It’s been a while but last I knew they were basically NL’s biggest startup incubator.

Philips doesn't make lightbulbs, only healthcare products now. The lighting brand was spun out into a new company called Signify [0] several years ago as part of Philips' persistent goal to divest themselves of anything that could be considered remotely innovative or forward thinking.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signify_N.V.

We need a not-for-profit tech company

Unfortunately, you, I and probably most people here are the outliers. The enshitification happens because 90% of consumers can't live without their things and will repeated hand companies money over and over while they deliver less and less.

I’ve got a number (~12) KASA products that I’m pretty happy with. Yes, they’re cloud-based, but you can turn that off after initial setup and use them directly over Wi-Fi.

That’s the other (mostly) good thing about… they’re Wi-Fi native and don’t use any sort of hub.

Their iOS app is reasonably decent, and there are honesceeen widgets.

Easy to build fairly advanced automations… for instance I have a rule that turns my bedside fan off and turns the bedroom lights on that runs 5 minutes before my alarm goes off, weekdays only.

Most of what I use are their bulbs, which are both relatively cheap ($30 for a 4 pack), with excellent CRI, variable color temp (including a nightshirt style automation that goes whiter during the day, and both warmer and dimmer at night), and full RGB color.

I probably wouldn’t recommend them for a whole home setup (you’d need pretty serious Wi-Fi routers) but for a case like mine where I’m only using it in a few rooms, it’s great.

Love my Kasa products. API is actively maintained and works super well. Products themselves work great. Their colored bulbs can emit a ton of colors and support scenes. Not as bright as I'd like, though.

You don't need the app if you're using Home Assistant, py-Kasa or something like that since the devices create their own WiFi network on first boot and you can program them from there.

I run 30+ Wi-Fi bulbs on an eero mesh. These devices are noisy but they are responsive (slower than zigbee). Only disadvantage is that they live or die by DHCP. If they can't renew their lease, it can take a while for them to come back online.

The one thing I really wish they could do colorwise is the classic "submarine dark red so it doesn't ruin your night vision" thing. The red really doesn't get deeper past a fairly modest point, it just gets dimmer.

Agree that the Kasa app is great, but the QC on their hardware is lacking. I bought a four pack, and two of them just refuse to stay connected to my Unifi 6 Pro access points. After a day or two they drop connection and won't reconnect until you unplug/replug them. Timers, etc all stop working and they get stuck in whatever state they were in - even the button on the plug doesn't work.

Zigbee/Z-Wave plugs have been rock solid reliable.

Surprised I haven't seen more mentions of Z-wave here. It seems like something that would be more popular.

What happens when your wifi goes down? I mean the local wifi, as often happens for these not "pretty serious routers".

I realize wifi might be the best of several bad options though.

Flick the wall switch twice. That’ll power cycle it and it defaults to on (although you can configure that, too).

The smart plugs that I use for fans have a physical push button

The problem is investors. Investors don't care about a sustainable business. They want infinite growth, and sucking dry both the the customers and the business itself.

The problem is also your fellow consumers, most of whom don’t actually care about the things us nerds care about.

They do care about getting screwed over. In my experience though they forget about it pretty fast and/or just feel overwhelmed and powerless about the situation. Maybe they'll avoid a specific brand after a bad experience, but they won't be checking over specs or considering requirements for the next thing they buy that rips them off.

Define "getting screwed over". For instance, I do not care about Google Maps using my location data in aggregate to improve traffic predictions. But so-called nerds would consider that "getting screwed over". There are uses of private data that can be harmlessly used to support functioning business models - the alternate is ads and/or subscriptions

> Define "getting screwed over". For instance, I do not care about Google Maps using my location data in aggregate to improve traffic predictions.

This guy didn't care about his location data going to google either: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...

He got screwed over big time. Thousands of dollars, just to avoid a jail cell.

There are uses of personal data that can be harmless, but once that data is in the hands of someone else you don't have any say in how it is used (harmless or otherwise) and even if the people using your data today aren't doing anything abusive with it, that data will live forever and you never know who will end up with it in the future or what they will do with it.

If the alternative is a subscription (assuming that actually means your data is not handed over to someone else) then at least you'll know what the cost of a product/service is, and you'll only pay for it while you're subscribed.

If you pay with your data, once it's out of your hands it can be used against you again and again at any time so you never get to stop "paying" and can never know what it will ultimately cost you.

As another example of getting screwed over, I've got a family member who bought a bluray of some movie in a shop, and then when she got home to play it found that her player refused because of DRM. The player wasn't connected to the internet and it needed to connect to a remote server in order to get permission to play her legally purchased media on her legally purchased player. She didn't understand what was happening and called me. The player didn't have wifi. The company sold a special USB wifi adapter at an insane price, otherwise she'd either have to move her furniture to take the player upstairs next to her modem and connect it physically, or run a very very long cable across her entire house.

The next time she needed a bluray player, she avoided the old brand, but didn't even check to see if it had wifi capability before buying (she got lucky and it did).

The alternative is government standards. You have power outlets you can interchangeably plug different appliances into. Why? Standards. Let there be a standard for color-controllable light sources that ensures interoperability of components, and then there will be competition to hit price-vs-shittiness balances suiting multiple parties.

The national electrical code is a private standard. Many local laws directly reference it, but it's not created nor maintained by the government in any way. These standards often come about by simply recognizing the most popular solution and then codifying it.

The government is not better at this than the market.

It’s not the market that is enforcing those codes, and without enforcement - rules are just suggestions.

Of course it is. Try buying insurance on a house that didn't get a building permit. Try reselling it. And how, exactly, does the government "enforce" the code? Are you put in jail for not following it?

I don’t know about the US but in many countries if a building can’t be brought up to code it will be condemned.

In the US, it can definitely reach the point where they will tear it down and send you the bill for the demolition. And if you don’t pay that bill, they’ll then auction off your land to get paid.

The government - that supplies that building permit - does also literally send an inspector to my property to enforce the code, yes.

And the same government makes sure that the code, in addition to including things that are actually necessary for your safety, also includes a lot of other things that aren't, but that are beneficial for the friends and relatives of government officials who run construction companies and don't want to have to innovate. As Robert Heinlein once said, "We have never seen a modern house."

You can be, quite easily - see Title 8, 3321b2 (a PA law that lets PA municipalities punish building ordinance violations via criminal process) - most states have some version of this.

https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/LI/consCheck.cfm?...

This isn't always a state level issue. It's often established county by county. There are lots of counties in the US where there is no zoning law. The only state business you need to do there is report any improvements to the appraiser for tax purposes.

Some of these districts _do_ have inspectors anyways, and they will issue permits, but the county itself does not require you to do this. As I said though, you will certainly be unable to insure anything you've built without a permit in these places. Aside from that, you can build what you want however you want.

I’ve never had trouble selling a house with unpermitted work (not mine, but previous owners’)

Before concluding that the NHS health record is the only option, you should consider industry standards like USB, which in some cases have worked well. We must have a failure-and-improvement cycle in case the standard is bad and fundamentally doesn’t work. We forgo that cycle when the government takes up the cause, even worse yet when the regulators are captured by some collusive fiend.

USB is now a pile of incompatible standards in a trench coat, holding hands with a menagerie of incompatible connectors in another trench coat, all wrapped in a third larger trench coat and claiming to be a single universal standard.

Yeah, I was going to say the same, just not as creatively.

USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.

> USB is not the poster child for successful industry-led standards.

Every day billions of devices use USB for charging and data transfer and work just fine.. was there some government intervention that jumped in to make that work that I am unfamiliar with?

However the sausage was made.. and is still being made... may be imperfect and ugly but USB seems pretty darn successful!

Bluetooth too!

Not to be that guy, but there was the intervention of the EU to force phone makers to use USB...

No, you be that guy. As many gripes as I have with USB, the EU forcing all phone manufacturers to use a common charging standard was huge. This is the kind of thing where government action really can improve on a Nash equilibrium.

Right, but that is entirely unrelated to USB working -- the regulation exists long after USB had proven itself.. because it had proven itself.

What’s an alternative system that’s better?

Apple’s Lightning has some of the worst connectors ever. I have about 5 USB-C cables and about 10 Lightning cables in my home. Each Lightning cable cost me more than 2x rhe most expensive USB-C cable bought from a convenience store and yet 4/5 of the Lightning cables have their wiring inside exposed while the USB-C ones could pass off as new.

The only issue I’ve ever had with a device on the USB-C side is 1 cable that is incapable of charging my wife’s macbook.

Guess how many of my Apple made Lightning cables are capable of charging my wife’s MacBook.

I really hope you get to write the forward for the next published 3GPP specification.

Yeah, but at the end of the day the serial bus seems to work well enough.

Power delivery is wonky, but it’s pretty rare, bordering on never for me anyway, to plug in a peripheral and not have it just work.

Power delivery is the worst, but for a long time it was super random whether you'd get USB2 or USB3 speed, wait sorry USB3 High Speed or USB3 Full Speed or whatever they renamed it to. And then there's the confusion between USB 1/2/3/etc. and A/B/mini-A/mini-B/micro-A/micro-B/C connectors, and the fact that it requires a half-page infographic to just sum up the latter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Connector_type_quick_refer...). Overall I feel that the USB Working Group, wait the USB Promoter Group, wait- who even are they? should take a vow of penance and refer to themselves as the SB Group until they sort this out.

The paradox of maintaining good standards are that they don't break, and are hence, paid less to maintain. Or seem to not even exist.

Look at how well DNS, or TCP/IP is maintained, or Wikimedia is run

> The alternative is government standards

The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites. That would be a nice trend to see. And I have some hope we might.

Actual reputable engineers leading engineering companies, doctors leading medical start-ups, career drivers leading car manufacturers, and so on. That is sustainable. I don’t get the infatuation investors have with the business class where even the most incompetent CEO with experience is often preferred to real competence of a specialist. That experience is available (and much cheaper!) through consulting contracts.

Investing in enshittification schemes is known in some circles as “shitting where you eat”, pardon the strong idiom. It harms the industry they’re trying to exploit for profit. It’s not only parasitic, but self-destructive.

Is this wishful thinking or did they actually price hike enough to lose money?

> The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites

That definitely exists and happens all the time

> career drivers leading car manufacturers

?? Driving around a lot doesn’t mean you know anything about manufacturing cars. You may have good inputs on what the interior design should be, but getting a team to build a million mile engine requires a different skill set.

Don’t be so surprised. McLaren, Shelby, Ferrari, Pagani Automobili, etc were founded and lead by career drivers.

> The alternative could be investors investing their capital responsibly, in companies with competent C-suites

That will never happen, the influence of money is always corrupting. There is no free market solution, these are things that have to be enforced by law.

I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, but it’s not money that’s corrupting.

I find the moralizing of these actions quite frustrating because they seem to indicate people don’t actually understand why things work the way do.

The C-suite aren’t corrupt. They have a job to do and they’re doing their job. Their job is to maximize returns on the investors’ investments. That’s it. It’s absolutely moral for them to do that job.

One might complain that their actions focus too much on the short term rather than the long term, and that would be a legitimate complaint. But only if it means they’re losing money in the long term. Enshittification usually makes money both in the short and long terms.

Once we recognize that people aren’t being “corrupt” but actually doing the job they’re being paid to do by maximizing their profits, one can focus on how to provide incentives to maximize profits without making things worse. And profit maximization inevitably leads to making things worse because it requires minimizing what you’re giving the customer and maximizing what you’re getting from them.

The free market check on this is competition. But competition only works if it’s a genuinely competitive market, and there are clear signals to the customer who is educated in understanding and valuing those signals, regarding the quality of products.

This used to be much easier earlier where products were simpler, but it’s much harder now. The vast majority of the market will have no ability to evaluate the risk of needing an online account to switch on your light bulb. And so a company which provides the no login option will be less competitive because it won’t be able to make money off your data and it will have to support an additional workflow.

In the absence of customer knowledge and visibility we only really have standards.

Ideally you start with standards provided by industry trade bodies. However, those are ripe for corruption and as a result there’s hardly any such successful standards.

Which leads you to the final option which is govt standards that are either highly encouraged by the threat of possibly instituting firmer regulations or just plain and simple regulated with the threat of fines and jail.

No need to be so cynical. Regular people are investing in publicly traded companies and they do care. Activist investing is on the rise. Private investors in the tech sector now do much more rigorous vetting of companies (especially after series B) than a decade ago, many people are already talking about the end of cheap money. Also, the phenomenon called techlash affects investors as well.

It might not be happening at a large scale, but we are moving in that direction in recent years.

That's basically what the Matter specification is.

I was excited for Matter for all it promises... but companies seem to be explicitly holding back support for it because they recognize that it will bring less control for them, less differentiation, and far fewer opportunities to force these money-squeezing ideas onto consumers. I hope to be proven wrong but I'm not feeling very optimistic about its long-term future right now.

You think government/standard is immune to enshittification?

No but I do think it’s more resistant than what we currently have? Yes.

It would be regulatory capture. The same companies that are enshitifying these products would send lobbyists to law makers to build a larger moat around their shitty products.

Doesn’t have to be immune to be better.

>The better the product is and the larger the customer base becomes, the higher >the likelihood that some business planner is going to see dollar signs and try to >squeeze the product for everything it’s worth

Absolutely true. The more successful they are, the more likely they'll abuse their influence

Just don't buy this stuff. A regular hand-operated light switch works fine and costs like 50 cents.

My rule is to never buy hardware that needs an app to function. It's never once let me down.

If you like different color ambience in your room, you will pretty much need an app. The colored light industry will never make hardware controls for adjusting hue/saturation/contrast.

I don't doubt that you'll get better customization options with apps, but you aren't doomed to a life devoid of color without them.

We've got some colored lighting in the form of plain old LED strips with wired controllers, we've had a couple old fashioned single color bulbs at times, and there are other options like this: https://www.amazon.com/GE-Lighting-93100205-Replacement-Spec...

I'd really like to see something like openrgb (openrgb.org) for light bulbs though.

autoexec, like myself, will therefore choose to not like color ambiances in our rooms.

I've managed to come up with a few app free options, more limited, but still effective and less abusive than an app. I'd make do with a string of Christmas lights if I had to.

That's not true, Zigbee remotes can pair directly to lightbulbs (including Philips Hue) and control the color. Example: https://rgbgenie.com/?product=rgbgenie-rgbw-remote-zigbee

Also, there are tons of cheap colored lightbulbs controlled directly by an infrared remote. Example: https://www.amazon.com/Light-Color-Changing-2700K-White/dp/B...

There are a bunch of like $10 rando lights that come with a remote, including hue and brightness (not contrast or saturation though).

Also, who ever made staff, let alone principal, by saying “yeah this product is basically perfect let’s just maintain it?”

If we funded you to build it and it worked, do you know what you'd do?

The exact same thing you're complaining about :)

For once, it is not enshittification. Home automation has always been shit.

We talked about it when I was a student, more than 20 years ago, and it was always he same story: attempts at vendor lock down, a lack of standards, potential customers unconvinced.

Sometimes, exceptionally, something not too bad comes out, but it never lasts. I ended up installing regular light bulbs with regular light switches connected to the breaker panel.

The Philips Hue system has been a simple and reliable system for years. And now they are enshittifying this service. "Home Automation" perhaps has always been shit, but this specific system used to be great and now it is being made shittier in the name of short term profits. That is enshittification IMO.

Could there be a collective development like Blender supported by donations over patreon?

> Corporations cannot just release a good product and support it

Plenty of companies do this. I'd wager most of the world economy consists of steady-state Mittelstand-esque firms that put out a good product with pride.

The problem is Silicon Valley's growth mindset was emulated broadly at a time when business history familiarity fell. (In part due to lower-level folks in Silicon Valley having a knee-jerk reaction to MBAs. In part due to said MBA programs deciding studying cases from a hundred years ago wasn't cutting edge.)

Growth is good. But trying to whip a business–that on its own will grow 2 or 3% a year and, with effort, 5 or 6%–to do 10 or 20% top-line YoY ruins it. The same way taking a growth business that could grow at 5 or 6% with effort, and instead committing to cutting its costs at 5% a year (the way one would do with a business that is in structural decline at a rate of 3 to 4% p.a.), is terrible strategy.

This is garbage management. It's bad for customers. It's bad for shareholders. It's bad for the societies whose technical knowledge is being eroded. It's good for a set of managers whose behavior veers between stupid and corrupt. I don't know the solution. But it's not as radical as overhauling corporate America in its entirety.

Philips is a Dutch multinational conglomerate. You cannot make any sincere argument about how this is the fault of Silicon Vally, or even the United States.

(Opinion) the only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system.

> Philips is a Dutch multinational conglomerate. You cannot make any sincere argument about how this is the fault of Silicon Vally

I never said it’s Silicon Valley’s fault. It’s the fault of managers emulating Silicon Valley in businesses that lack the underlying growth drivers.

> only common denominator remaining is the underlying economic system

If you ignore the corpus of counterfactuals I mentioned, sure. Blaming the entire economic system is a great way to stop marginal reforms. Perfect is the enemy of the good. (And in this case, it’s not perfection—it’s a utopia borne out of misreading the current economy as well as its history.)

>Blaming the entire economic system is a great way to stop marginal reforms. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

You have my interest: what marginal reforms would prevent a multinational conglomerate from enshittifying lightbulbs? Would you change the management structure? The ownership structure? You’d think an huge institution with the momentum Philips has would be able to resist the kind of “growth hacking” this article is complaining about, but that’s empirically not the case. If you were god for a day how would you restructure Philips Hue? (I’m digging for a heartfelt rant because I really don’t have a good answer here.)

> what marginal reforms would prevent a multinational conglomerate from enshittifying lightbulbs? Would you change the management structure? The ownership structure?

I’d remove sovereignty over the system from Philips. Consider mp3 or Arm. A balance of power. There the balance is between suppliers.

But let’s take the toughest case: you want to launch a system that users can trust long term, but you don’t have peer-level partners. (You also have executive authority at Philips.) First: divide standards writing from your corporate interests. You still want significant influence over the standard. But you want to remove the ability to make further changes unilaterally from your reports and successors. Universities are a natural partner in this; perhaps, also, a consumer-advocacy group. Second: give users clearly-defined and easily-marketed legal rights in respect of their devices.

The first added a public component to a limited section of your architecture. You’re not giving up profit, just control. (And future control, at that.) The second does threaten profits, but only in the long term; you’re leaning into management’s short-term profit incentives in both cases. Finally, to guard against the legal rights being curtailed by a future executive, build in a poison pill: if they’re reduced within certain parameters, certain IP becomes freely licenseable for repairs, et cetera. (I’d also add in engineering representation at the subsidiary’s Board level, perhaps with a separate ESOP package or whatever, but that’s likely more trouble than it’s worth.)

The above recapitulates the history of enlightened despots. Using absolute power to limit successors while giving balancing voices at the table. In Philips case, there was no ecosystem. No third-party developers of note. Users in insufficient numbers and organisation to pressure management. Betting on humans being good for goodness’ sake is a terrible philosophy, irrespective of how they’re organised.

And dare I say, had they done the above and created an ecosystem where they were a major—but not the dominant—player, there is a good chance I’d have their product in my house right now. By choosing a non-aligned model, Philips lost long-term value, both by sacrificing revenue and assuming the entire network’s development cost.

But look. There is a product that can yield some money by dying. Having died, it clears the space it has been taking, so a new product can be marketed as a replacement.

Under a certain angle, it's a win-win proposition!

Call me an old man yelling at the cloud, but I just don't understand the hype of connected lightbulbs. In absolute, would I like to be able to turn off the lights from my smartphone? Well, sure, if there was absolutely no cost to it. But the negatives of being tied to Yet Another Cloud Service potentially subject to data breaches, of installing an app on my phone that's going to require space, updates, and an online account, of depending on a piece of electronics with a shitty firmware that's eventually going to break or go end-of-life, just vastly outweigh the positives.

In a vacuum, having more features is good. But simplicity itself is a feature. Simple things don't break as often, it's easier to fix when they do, and they're more predictable, meaning it's easier to plan your life around them.

It’s having color changing lightbulbs that was the feature for me.

Most basic is shifting from 5000k white to 3500k white in the evening. Color scenes are nice too.

Phillips sells dimmable bulbs that become redder as they dim. Those plus a few dimmer switches are all I've needed to create that effect, no network access needed.

Neat, but that's only one piece. Plus, I LIKE HomeKit.

I would also add voice control.

I have various lights outside. It's quite nice to be able to say "hey google, turn on the pool lights" when I want to see, or turn them off if someone left them on.

When it's hot, I put a window fan in my bedroom in the evenings. I have it plugged into a smart switch. The google routine turns it off around 2am automatically. I sometimes adjust the time depending on season.

I haven't rewired the light switches in the house because it's not that important to me, but it would be nice to be able to say "hey google, turn off all the lights" when I go out instead of running around flipping switches.

I honestly don't care if someone in China knows if my lights are on.

> I honestly don't care if someone in China knows if my lights are on.

What about someone in China using your devices as part of their botnet to DDoS someone?

I would notice when I periodically check my network console. Hasn't happened yet.

> Call me an old man yelling at the cloud, but I just don't understand the hype of connected lightbulbs.

That was me, a few years ago. Now I love them (I use IKEA bulbs and outlets) and would hate to go back. Being about to control my lights from anywhere is just convenient. Now when I climb into bed and wonder if I’ve turned off the light in the basement (a frequent issue), I can just use my phone, not descend three flights and causing noise for others.

I like IKEA’s implementation because the cloud service for me is really Apple HomeKit, which I trust more than others.

Apple HomePod controls mine. No apps, no cloud, no internet needed.

As long as your 'connected' devices are bulbs going into normal sockets, you can always just fall back to the way you do it now. My Home Assistant is just kind of an appliance (running on a 10 year old mac mini), that I do essentially nothing to keep working. If I unplugged it, I'd just be back to where you are now.

That said, when I set up Home Assistant, it was not without the need for some hobbyist motivation, but it wasn't too bad. That was over a year ago, and I have only gone into it since then to add a couple extra lights and set up a Christmas mode.

As far as the 'why', I can put the light switches where I want them, and have them do exactly what I want. I don't use voice or phone control, I have physical switches, but they're just exactly where it makes sense. An example is that in my living room I have a switch remote on the coffee table that lets me turn on or off all lights in view (kitchen, hallway, living room) and two different light scenes for reading or watching TV.

To me, it's actually simpler than flipping the 5 or 6 switches I would have to otherwise.

Of all the problems I'm trying to solve, "using light switches" is definitely not one of them. They're fine.

I can't address the hype part, but just wanted to signal that for folks with some disabilities (including some older adults) these connected lightbulbs are very useful. Until, of course, Philips (and others) decide to screw with their customers. And Philips - a company, which manufactures medical devices - should know better, especially after losing so much goodwill after their CPAP equipment recall and creating a crisis in that market.

Not to high-jack but I too would like to lament (and hopefully humor HN) about "smart home" gadgets and the companies behind them.

I bought a "Cync" bulb from GE and had to reset it, I couldn't for the life of me. This is their official video on how to do it:

https://youtu.be/1BB6wj6RyKo

You have to repeat a sequence with near perfect timing, that takes about a minute straight. Since we moved, I had to do this for 4 lights and wanted to tear my hair out, lol.

I've found that for whatever reason, "smart home" stuff is some of the worst designed and managed products out there.

Smart home, dumb manufacturers

What in the bowels of unholy hell

    We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).

    Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
    1. Turn on for 8 seconds 
    2. Turn off for 2 seconds
    3. Turn on for 8 seconds
    4. Turn off for 2 seconds
    5. Turn on for 8 seconds
    6. Turn off for 2 seconds
    7. Turn on for 8 seconds
    8. Turn off for 2 seconds
    9. Turn on for 8 seconds
    10. Turn off for 2 seconds


    If the factory reset above was unsuccessful, you might have an older version of the C by GE bulb. Please follow the instructions below to reset.

    Bulb Reset Sequence – for firmware version 2.7 or earlier:
    We recommend counting with Mississippi (1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, etc.).

    Start with your bulb off for at least 5 seconds.
    1. Turn on for 8 seconds 
    2. Turn off for 2 seconds
    3. Turn on for 2 seconds
    4. Power off for 2 seconds
    5. Turn on for 2 seconds
    6. Power off for 2 seconds
    7. Turn on for 2 seconds
    8. Power off for 2 seconds
    9. Turn on for 8 seconds
    10. Power off for 2 seconds
    11. Turn on for 8 seconds
    12. Power off for 2 seconds

I like how this implies that after firmware release 2.7, they decided that 12 different power cycling patterns was too many, so they lowered it to 10. Wouldn't want some unsuspecting user to reset their bulbs by accidentally following an exact pattern up to 9 times.

Right!? Maybe we're all just crazy and there's a method to the madness but I spent an average of 15 minutes just trying to get it to pick up the reset, PER LIGHT.

As a counter to this, my 2 smart light bulbs (different brands) both like to reset themselves all the damn time. There is supposed to be a particular needed sequence to reset them but in reality just turning the switch on, off, then remembering you needed something in the room and turning the lights on again quickly, is enough to do the trick.

Signing in to an account takes 10 seconds.

And corporate control of your hardware lasts a lifetime.

And never having account takes 0 seconds.

Being locked out of your account because of something you don't expect and not able to use your device is an experience you will never forget.

The saddest part about this article is the end: forget Hue, just buy IKEA.

Did OP even read what they wrote? OP is collapsing into stupidity along with the IoT market.

No, don't buy Ikea smart lights: just buy a mechanical light switch from the 1920's and drop the whole idea of smart automation of every goddamn thing.

Why not ditch electricity in favour or oil lanterns, or cut to the chase and move into a cave and maintain a campfire 24/365 like our ancestors?

Don’t like it don’t buy it isn’t a good attitude to have anymore, otherwise we as consumers will lose more and more rights to privacy infringing companies with infinite resources and market reach.

Wow, you're good a fallacious reasoning,

Here's another one: why question if something is actually "progress", when change is progress and progress is always good so change is good.

In my experience, enforcing log-in for for this kind of consumer product done for the sake of security, rather than user hostility. Internet connected hardware on a home network is a very attractive attack vector, especially if commands are unauthenticated.

This logic breaks down for hardware vendors don’t allow access to an underlying Linux system the IoT device is running on. The malware looks for easy targets to get root on - not so much turning on and off lights.

In my experience, my consumer products are significantly MORE secure when not requiring a log-in or in fact anything that requires any level of external network access to be facilitated or that mandates a requirement for personal or authentication related services to be hosted outside of my network, and that includes their applications. A potential avenue for security related incidents is now being forced upon users where previously it did not exist. Phillips can't leak my data due to incompetence when they don't have it, only now, they will.

"security" indeed.

Quite literally a first world problem.

Dose anyone else just feel embarrassed reading articles like this (especially on the top of HN)? We really are having the best of times in 2023 when not able to changing the colors of light bulbs w/o logging in is a, seemingly, big deal. Or it really is just the end game before the collapse.

First it's about precedent. HTTP or something else using TCP/IP is eating the world and while reading that article I remembered that this blood pressure measurement device I bought with Bluetooth also forces me to login in the their shitty cloud to sync the data with their app. You're whole existence will look like that at this point I already gave up on the privacy aspect of it which is also not okay but that shit is just unusable, broken and won't work in 5 years.

Fucking planet is heating it's not okay fucking lightbulb remote control and blood pressure measurement should be local and easy. It's about how we do digitalization.

Having said that - I also think I don't need that stuff and I don't have it so it's a first world problem. The display shows the blood pressure - Bluetooth is not needed and I've already thought led lightbulbs are to expensive and I'm far too poor to buy some internet connected expensive stuff.

I'm embarrassed at that cheap take at home assistant which seems to be some kind of free open-source version?

On the other hand it's a rant I really can't blame the article it's good at what it does and doesn't want to solve the world's problems. It's just pure frustration about a product that used to work without some shitty cloud and we should collectively fight that we can use and buy stuff without any shitty cloud. It's important. Because it will be everywhere - or already is.

And sure there is an imperialist war going , people don't get healthcare and are still enslaved. It's very first world middle class or even upper middle class privileged problem.

Yes, everything involving smart tech is a first world problem, but that does not mean we should be silent about it. This move is bullshit. If you are comfortable with corporations pushing more and more bullshit into their products even after the fact, fine. I am not, because a lot of my quality of life, for better and worse, depends on their products.

> Quite literally a first world problem.

Exactly. People who have to work for a living are not wasting time or money on the unregulated, abusive, intrusive, deceptive, under-delivering shit show that home automation has become. They just like, hit the light switch. People of normal means do not have time for all this sillyness.

I have a spinal cord injury (well technically, its an "incomplete" spinal cord injury) and yet must still work for a living (to the extent that I can). I make significant use of this technology as I have limited movement and significant daily pain and limitations I must live with.

I like that I can control things without needing to get up again if required (as mobility is quite difficult for me) but I also make use of motion sensors/schedules and stuff to ensure as much as possible that the areas i'm in are lit without me having to mess around with switches and stuff which can often be difficult with a cane in one hand, if I want to do literally anything else with the other.

It may well be a first world problem for some, but for me, it is simply a problem full stop and some basic home automation stuff has been a big help.

> Instead, I have a simpler workaround, assuming you just have lights and "smart outlets" in your life. Get a hold of an Ikea Dirigera hub. Then delete the units from the Hue Hub and add them to the Ikea side of things. It'll run them just fine, and will also export them to HomeKit so that much will keep working as well.

I have a simpler solution. Take all this home automation stuff and throw it out. Replace it with non tech equivalents. Observe your stress and care melt away. Spend your energy on endeavors that matter, like family, friends, and Nintendo Switch emulators.

But then I have to get off bed to turn off the ceiling light D:

I do not understand the people who buy garbage products they don't need and then complain when they inevitably decompose and attract flies. You literally purchased a light bulb with software. You did this to yourself. It's like setting your yard on fire instead of mowing and then complaining that the yard looks bad.

I deal with shitty technology products every day. Bugs out the ass, terrible UX. When I report the bugs or point out how horrible they are to use, I'm either ignored, or told it's my problem. Do I complain? No, because I've learned that a horrible experience is what I should expect from technology. A shit experience is par for the course. I should really be happy that my phone has not killed me yet. Though seeing as cars are increasingly becoming very large smartphones, that might not last long... If you only knew how horrifying the software for chargers is, you wouldn't walk near one.

There's nothing inevitable about this stuff if you avoid The Cloud from the beginning. Hue used to be about that, with the app locally controlling everything and the cloud as just an option. Because of that, all of my Hue bulbs will continue to work just fine. I never used their app in the first place.

Keep that same mindset with any whizbang tech, and you'll mostly be alright. Cheap build quality is something else to watch out for, but that infects "dumb" devices just as much.

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