Not sure about "other service" remark, since I was just describing how the Modern Roombas and app actually work. Sure in theory the Roomba could have been desi

Not sure about "other service" remark, since I was just describing how the Modern Roombas and app actually work. Sure in theory the Roomba could have been designed to never need to call home, and just share map data locally over wifi with the app, and have the app process the maps. But they did not design it like that. Indeed I suspect they might consider how the internal mapping data works to be a trade secret, in which case, they want to do such processing on their own servers, to avoid people reverse engineering it by reversing the app. For whatever reason, there does not seem to be much effort being made by people to hack the Roomba firmware. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has a well protected design (e.g. encrypted in flash, using a key stored in the processor or something)?