Bad business broke the smart home | Hacker News Reader

Bad business broke the smart home

theverge.com

27 pointsmfiguiere10 comments

I stay away from almost all home equipment that requires an internet connection or advertises that it can be controlled by mobile for this very reason.

It's all going to fail sooner or later, and/or it sells out your privacy, and probably both.

And you'd think I was being silly, or kidding, or just old. But the number of cases where this goes south is so large that it's the rule rather than the exception.

I suspect the root cause is the slow walk adoption of IPv6. Everything needs to work over NAT, (and possibly over dynamic IP) which really limits your options.

I've never had an interest in a "smart home", and I wonder if that leads to the bad business practices they talk about here.

If there were something truly compelling about smart homes, more people would adopt it, and there would be more innovation in connecting up the various pieces. I suspect it might compel manufacturers to get on the same page. Compare it to the way browser makers push and pull on browser standards, until they eventually reach a rough equilibrium, because everybody wants their web page to work on every browser.

Smart home products all have their uses, but they all feel like minor improvements at best. I suppose it might be nice to have my house hook up to my phone and say "He'll be home in 45 minutes, so let's start warming it up now, and turn on the front hall lights when he parks".

But I'll be honest that I just dread the idea of trying to control a light bulb with an app. I really looked into that, because I've got a bedside lamp that can be controlled from a wall switch, and a common pattern is "shut it off at the lamp, wake up, leave during daytime, find the wall switch doesn't work". But the option is either pulling out my phone, or walking over and turning it on by hand. Even the negligible effort of using my phone seems like too much compared to the $0 alternative.

That's just a trivial personal example, but it illustrates why I think the smart home idea just isn't compelling enough to produce the vast sum of money that would allow manufacturers to innovate without trying to squeeze out profits from every aspect. Maybe somebody will find the killer app at some point, but in the meantime it feels like (yet another) solution in search of a problem, and doing so in a way that irritates even those who feel it can solve their problem.

Voice control over lights is pretty neat! As is being able to change light color (manually, or automatically as the sun goes down to shift to less blue light)

Moisture sensors by my water heater are really nice things to have, and a garage door sensor that I can check from bed to know if the door is open or closed.

I also like smart plugs that have power consumption reporting built in.

I have a few major use cases: * I don’t need to get out of bed to turn off the lights to go to sleep * A notification when my laundry is finished washing so that I don’t forget to switch it to the dryer *Being able to control my fans from my smart watch

Everything else has pretty much grown from there as I find ways to make life easier for myself. Most of it revolves around being able to control my environment without stopping what I’m doing.

One other nice to have is my lights color temperature being synced to the sun, helping with circadian rhythms, but that’s icing on the cake.

Home assistant with zigbee, z-wave, or tasmota/esphome devices is pretty great.

This is definitely better than many of the alternatives but still not perfect. With Zigbee etc you end up locked into one or more of the ecosystems, not to mention some manufacturers implementing it in a way that has weird quirks (see [1]). With esphome you have a limited choice of devices (would love to see more), but you also usually end up locked into keeping a 2.4GHz WPA2 AP for your devices (and you miss out on mesh, but also the problems when it doesn't work...)

1: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/16717

I've got a home running that's a mixture of Wi-Fi from different (and mutually incompatible) vendors, zigbee, z-wave, and even a little bit of bluetooth. All of it is abstracted away by drivers inside of Home assistant so you deal with all of these devices using a common API, which is presented as a common UI at the finger tapping level.

There's absolutely nothing stopping you from mixing and matching all sorts of different wireless protocols and media types, or even wired ones (Ethernet).

1000 manufactures, each using their own app which is just a toolkit shell maintained by someone else. It sucks but I'm addicted to smart lights

Once you have lights that change hue based on time of day/sunrise/sunset you'll never go back.

All the garbage that comes with is just the current cost to pay. And it's not that bad if you cut them off from the internet and make HomeAssistant do the real work.

> …interoperability isn’t the issue.

I may be missing something, but every example I saw is about interoperability. It’s just that most of the failures are artificially created by the device manufacturers.

We don’t need more regulation. We need people to be informed that they have options which aren’t dependent on proprietary software and services run by scumbag companies.

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