I do think a large part of the reason so many devices need "internet" access is because we (as developers) have failed to come up with a good way of accessing t

I do think a large part of the reason so many devices need "internet" access is because we (as developers) have failed to come up with a good way of accessing these things locally. So many things in my house have static IP addresses because I want to access them locally, it's an absolute pain in the ass and not at all something that your average person could manage. Having an IoT device send all of it's data to a "cloud" server is the easiest and most fullproof way to make sure everyone can use see it. Without that, you are looking at complicated local addressing systems, hoping that your users aren't using client isolation or something like it (and you WILL get calls because they tried to use the device on a hotel network where each client is isolated and it didn't work), and ugly URLs at best.