Recently, Charter Communication folded up its home security business, leaving everyone with useless e-waste. Then you have Youtubers hawking cloud IoT things l

Recently, Charter Communication folded up its home security business, leaving everyone with useless e-waste. Then you have Youtubers hawking cloud IoT things like SimpliSafe, Ring, Nest, Alexa/Google Home/etc.-enabled devices that will disappear whenever they decide to end support. It gets worse. I remember some Motorola Mobility smartphones phones from around 2008-2010 that absolutely required Motorola to continue to run its own servers for some of their social media functions to work (like Facebook) because they were skimming analytics from their customers and reselling them without their knowledge or permission. I know this because I did some consulting on-site for them. Many of the people came from Danger where a similar thing occurred, which was a muddy tarpit Microsoft later realized they shouldn't have purchased. TBH, I think there's a market for end-to-end self-hosted products that go through a privacy-focused firewall WiFi gateway and has some computing power that can run server apps locally rather than being cloud enabled. And for work-anywhere mobile apps, there ought to be some sort of universal rendezvous protocol that supports end-to-end-encryption that the devices can talk to. And of course, the mobile apps, local servers apps and Zigbee/WiFi bridge server should all be open source.