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This issue has killed my interest in basically all smart-home products I can find on the market, even ignoring their massive privacy issues. The most useful 'b
by Bartweiss 8y ago
This issue has killed my interest in basically all smart-home products I can find on the market, even ignoring their massive privacy issues.
The most useful 'basic' behavior I could think of for a smart home device was to check the weather and trigger my alarm earlier in bad weather or heavy traffic. I knew IFTTT was capable of running scripts then a trigger happened, checking the weather and traffic, and setting off an alarm, so it seemed obvious. I literally wanted "if this (or this), then that"!
No such luck. The basic IFTTT setup couldn't do it at all, no existing app could do it, and the developer program was invite-only. I got in after quite a long time, and even then it wasn't obvious. IFTTT wanted to treat 'check weather' as a script output exclusively, which I couldn't feed into any other system. The best I could do was be told the weather when I woke up. So, I stuck with the phone that could already do that.
That specific situation might have improved, but the general ecosystem doesn't seem much better. The only smart-home features I see available that I would use are list-making, music/media playing, and quick reference. But the features I would actually value are dense integration between apps, floating scripts like the one you describe, and non-user-triggered events to turn active tasks into passive ones. Those seem to be the features which are least available, even when they would be easy to implement.