Meta note: I think we should be angrier at Apple and Google over this. It’s in their interest to push everyone and everything to the cloud (their clouds ideally) and so they never pushed for great local connectivity solutions in their phone OSes.

There’s not really a good reason why it has to be hard for a device to connect to a nearby phone over some reliable signal, eg a home’s existing wifi network. (HN disclaimer: yeah yeah, i know it’s possible, but it’s a big hassle and the UX sucks so a manufacturer is effectively forced to go cloud if they want a device to be controllable from an app). The industry could have long developed some fancy protocol/system over wifi intended for just that. But device manufacturers aren’t strong enough to push for that in networking land, and Apple/Google/Microsoft have an interest against “local” becoming a normal thing normal people can figure out.

I feel like this is what regulation should be about. Instead of demanding that companies open source their systems if they go under, IMO we should have rules saying that smart devices shouldn’t need internet access for controlling them from nearby. If rules like that are in place, a push for a way to make the UX for that as good as it is via some cloud server will automatically happen.