Totally agreed on point one, I think it is an incredibly sad state of affairs though. For point two, I'm pretty desensitized to the sad state of affairs that i

Totally agreed on point one, I think it is an incredibly sad state of affairs though. For point two, I'm pretty desensitized to the sad state of affairs that is big-player web service support. The phishing vector of "Hi, I'm calling from Microsoft and need your social security number" is mind boggling. I've had to tell older family members (including lifelong software developers and tenured CS professors) that no major tech company would ever let you speak to a real human to save your life... too many times. I don't see progress happening on that front for some time, but I don't think that should stop them from giving us devs the damn docs. And for who the user would blame, I see a few counterarguments there. First, if I get some weird no-name IOT device, I'm definitely blaming the maker first if there is a problem. I think most consumers place a fair amount of trust in the big tech companies, and would come to the same conclusion. Second, if they want to lock down their platforms, they could just use the Play Store approach, and require adding a developer key somewhere and enabling a dev mode on the smarthome device.