> That makes it sound like their primary concern is keeping control of the devices. In reality I think it's just laziness. I sincerely believe that many of the

> That makes it sound like their primary concern is keeping control of the devices. In reality I think it's just laziness. I sincerely believe that many of these entrants into IoT do want to remain in control of the devices and the users who "rent" said hardware. I've seen laziness in code before. It's usually sloppy, unmaintained/badly maintained, and just messy. These products are polished, just work, and smooth... and make you go through their systems. That's an intentionally designed system. > We all know how much easier it is to support code running on a server than to support code running on hardware sitting on somebody's dusty garage shelf with no internet connection. Indeed true. I'm not advocating axing out those features. I said to add in another: which is to use open standards as well. I also develop IoT hardware (not for sale). I use Arduino Nanos, nRF24L01+ radio chips, whatever sensors/actuators for the hardware. For the software, I use Node-Red, Mosquitto (MQTT server), and Apache NiFi. For "cloud support", I use Tor Hidden Services at every gateway machine, and communicate between .onion addresses. I effectively treat all my machines in the world as a simple ethernet hub. I'm just an individual, and was able to figure all this out.