I made sure to buy zigbee ones so that I'm just tied to home assistant which even if it goes out of business will still work with whatever binaries I've downloaded already (as well as it works locally so I can control them during internet outages). I'm sure somebody else can explain why you should get Thread or Matter nowendays but I never bothered to learn the differences.
But yeah, the average life of a company is what 1 year? Don't get any product you want for more than 5 years from a company younger than 5 years if you need that company to exist for it to work.
The connectivity doesn't matter when it's the actual filaments/LEDs that burn out after only a year or two.
Even buying a big name like Sylvania doesn't help. I had eight Sylvania smart bulbs burn out or go into endless flicker fits in under a year. They're all in a landfill now.
Of course, that's better than when Feit Electric sent out a firmware update that deliberately bricked all of its smart bulb controller boxes with nothing more than an e-mail telling people it was done. (This was before Apple Home or Google Home existed.)
Mind you, one would expect them to work for a long time considering they’re (probably) the most expensive on the market.
I can set individual colors and intensity on the lights as well as with a dumb switch I can also have the lights just come on so if I were to sell the house or whatever the next person wouldn't need to have home assistant to work anything in the house.
You can't control color easily, but you can get dimmable smart switches. I find for most lights, I don't change the colors pretty much ever. YMMV.
To change for another scene, have a button or voice command?
I’m with you here - make control „as usual as possible“, also saves a ton of money and annoyances - and most important: home automation is about automation, not controlling manually via phone…
The only complaints that I have are:
1) I have mine set to notify me when it's done cleaning. Sometimes it will do it immediately after it's done, while other times the notification might come two or three hours after the fact. Still other times, not at all.
2) I have to clean the vacuum more frequently than I would like. That means: cutting out hairs from the "side brush" on the front of it, cutting hairs out of the "main brush" that sucks up most of the debris, and wiping the sensors clean. In fairness, I'd probably have to do the same sorts of thing with the rollers on a normal vacuum cleaner after a while too, though.
3) There's been a handful of times over a 2-ish year period where it'll go to the other room to start cleaning, and while a normal trip might take 15-20 minutes, it'll claim to be done in about 5 minutes. I suspect that blankets may have fallen on the ground or something, so it became too "blocked" to be able to clean properly, but it could be some kind of software error.
Check your mobile's app settings/battery optimisation? Sounds like the app doesn't keep running properly in the background
Exactly. We changed from some fancy one that my boss gave me to a cheap one that you operate with an old-school (can't believe I'm saying that) infrared remote. It doesn't "think". It just works like our other reliable dumb machines - diswasher and washing machine. We don't own a regular vacuum cleaner as I just do a regular sweep with a broom when we want a thorough job done.
All other home tech gadgets friends and family have acquired live in limbo land stored in the back of the draw or on top of the cupboard, never opened or tried once but got stuck downloading some stupid app. But we can't just throw it away yet, as there's guilt around acquiring that smart tech thing in the first place even though we know there's already so much e-waste.
Vacuuming is actually the easiest bit of cleaning a house IMO - getting the floor clear (if you have kids, or out of control hobbies, or are just lazy or a bit of a horder) is hard.
People aren't stupid, they kind of know this. But just like buying expensive gym equipment they think that a new toy will incentivise them do the hard bits.
"If I buy a new gizmo I'll finally start cooking healthy delicious food" is a great pitch.
It was “easy” to vacuum before but we never did a thorough job. All too often we just vacuum what we can see, never under the couches, etc.
Now that we have to move everything so it can complete the full map we have a much cleaner house. It encourages us to move all of the chairs, toys, etc.
I worked on an IoT project at one of the big German car makers and it was a mess. More money than sense. They didn't really have any idea why they were putting software into stuff. Just some vague notion that some software systems needed to exist to then present its existence to the next boss up; presumably all the way up and out to investors. Discussing the actual functionality or how the product(s) would actually be experienced in the real world was essentially taboo.
There was a podcast called garbage.fm [1] with one of the hosts working for General Electric at the time it was recorded. It sounded like GE were yet another one of those incumbent companies doing "smart" Internet of Things products just because they were worried about being left behind.
I set all this up over the course of several years, as needed, and haven’t thought much about it since. It’s nice.