6 ms·

> It's a bit disappointing to see Haier's very reasonable response (an extra high AWS load is expensive, because AWS is just expensive by design) but only after

by MilaM 3y ago

> It's a bit disappointing to see Haier's very reasonable response (an extra high AWS load is expensive, because AWS is just expensive by design) but only after internet wide outrage. If this is the real reason, how long can you expect Haier to support the API free of charge for existing customers? Not very long I bet. The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection.

EvanAnderson 3y ago
It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices, and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. It would be great if we could go further and demand that manufacturers release the specs for their communications protocols if they exceed a threshold of unit sales, since they're effectively making a bunch of devices landfill fodder when they turn off the servers within the viable lifetime of the dependent devices. There's cool stuff out there I'd love to buy but once I see it requires an Internet connection it's a no-sale for me. (Even being locally controllable isn't a win if that comes with the requirement of running a closed source native "app". I'm still sad about some 32-bit iOS apps that Apple says I can't run on newer devices. I don't want to keep nursing an iPhone 3 along to be able to control a home appliance because the manufacturer figured out they can tie their product lifecycle to Apple's user-hostile backwards compatibility policies.) Sometime in the last 20 years the tech industry became a game of tempting me with cool features and then snatching them away, versus the exciting progress I remember from the 80s and 90s. I'm sure getting older is part of it, but I can't imagine shaping my habits around technology that can be taken away from me at any time would appeal to me at a younger age either.
- gh02t 3y ago
  > It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. Or just support a local API with a published spec. Matter is supposed to be that standard, but adoption is going slowly. Pretty sure zero people using the original reverse engineered cloud API for the Haier stuff in HA want to be using it in preference to a local API.
  - rokkitmensch 3y ago
    I suspect manufacturers see this particular standard as unlocking a race to the bottom in hardware prices and so are unwilling to bite.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      But they are rolling out support. Philips is one prominent example.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Those free cloud services are indeed predatory competition. They are both bundling and dumping.
- msla 3y ago
  > That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices This seems naïve: "Yes, it's making money, but it isn't making enough money" is the phrase on the tombstone of a lot of goods, services, and come down to it, countries through history. Being a customer is no guarantee you get to keep being a customer. > and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. "Special Deal: Comes With Free Six-Month Subscription With Purchase!" because six months is how long they intend to support the device, after which they turn off the service and brick all of them, and of course you can't opt out of the special deal because they don't get any of your data from a device that isn't slaved to their servers.
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    > This seems naïve: "Yes, it's making money, but it isn't making enough money" is the phrase on the tombstone of a lot of goods, services, ... I'm jaded enough to know it's not a panacea. It's further along the spectrum from "This is costing us money..." at least.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    At least in the EU, bricking after 6 months may cause some issues...
- plagiarist 3y ago
  If we're hoping for things, what about an even semi-conscious consumer base that just doesn't purchase cloud appliances? Collective action would end this problem overnight, just like it did here (although I think they are insane for buying cloud appliances in the first place).
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    The biggest risk I see to these Internet-hosted services is losing access to features (or, worse, 100% device functionality) when servers inevitably go away. That's why I won't use them. (Privacy is a concern to me too, but secondary. I wish the situation were good enough that I could worry about privacy.) What boggles my mind is how the average person seems so accepting of this. I get this pervasive sense that because "it's computers" or "computer adjacent" it's a given that you'll have to accept loss of functionality as devices age. I guess it needs to get a lot worse before it gets better.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      What does the average person know about engines in cars? Materials their houses are made of? This and about a million other complexities that are abstracted away in their lives? Needs to isn't the write term... Going to get a lot worse is going to happen. Getting better, well the issue is in doubt.
      - EvanAnderson 3y ago
        > What does the average person know about engines in cars? Materials their houses are made of? They don't know much about how those things work. They do know if they're losing functionality even if they don't know how they work. My observation is that people seem endlessly patient about losing functionality in computer adjacent devices-- far beyond what they would tolerate with other devices. I simply don't understand why this is the case. For virtually every consumer good there is some ability for independent repair. I think people would be up in arms if their car stopped working and the manufacturer said "Yeah, you just need to buy a new one". We have consumer protection laws in the US to prevent this very thing. With software connected to "smart" devices there are no significant protections. I don't think people even know to be up in arms about a device that doesn't work because it's "old" and the native app stops working or the Internet hosted servers went away. Worse, they just landfill the device and go buy the newest one. I assume it has something to do with the subsidized nature of smart phones and relatively short time people stick with a given phone. The "wow" factor of new technology probably dazzles people into forgetting about long-term usability too. Hopefully when the "throwaway" mentality of smart phones really starts to cost people (as more durable good type "smart" devices embrace this model) we'll see some public backlash.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paradox460 3y ago
  While all this was happening, I was finally getting my old broken PetNet feeder working again. I wrote did it using ESPHome, and wrote up a blog post about it [1]. The relevance to this situation is that PetNet made a pretty good pet feeder about 5 years ago. It dispensed well, had a good app, and mostly just worked. Then, during 2020, the company just disappeared. The app stopped working, and eventually, the feeders stopped feeding. I tossed mine into the ever-growing box of "I'll get to it later", and forgot about it for a few years. Getting it up and running wasn't tremendously difficult, and now it works almost as well as it did when its new, working significantly better in one critical area: Instead of having to sign into some other random app and fiddle with it there, I can just press a button in HomeAssistant and my cat gets a bunch of food. Maybe later I'll wire in things like the hopper sensors, scales, and other features that the device had, but for now a 1 second pulse of power works well enough There's not really any valid reason PetNet couldn't have just released the firmware flashing keys on the way out. The device likely runs on a microcontroller very similar to ESP32/ESP8622, and so had those keys been available, I could have used the "native" hardware. I suspect the overwhelming majority of these feeders wound up in landfills, as very few people, even the technically competent, are willing to take it apart, solder in a new control board, and get said board up and running. Which is an absolute shame. [1]: https://pdx.su/blog/2024-01-19-fixing-a-broken-smart-cat-feeder-with-esp32/ https://pdx.su/blog/2024-01-19-fixing-a-broken-smart-cat-fee...
- mindslight 3y ago
  My take is that we need a straightforward application of anti-trust principles to stop this bundling of hardware products with cloud hosting with user-facing control software. All three of those things should be required to be three separate products, only communicating over generic protocols. Then if companies offer the cloud hosting for free or even too low cost and then decide it's untenable (or go out of business, or stop maintaining their app, etc), users can switch elsewhere and all the previously manufactured, bought, and installed devices don't turn into trash overnight.
jeroenhd 3y ago
> The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection. Agreed. I wish companies would take the work already done for them with Matter and just integrate, but if they can't, the least they could do is support the things customers to do the things they want to do.

by MilaM 3y ago

EvanAnderson 3y ago

It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices, and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. It would be great if we could go further and demand that manufacturers release the specs for their communications protocols if they exceed a threshold of unit sales, since they're effectively making a bunch of devices landfill fodder when they turn off the servers within the viable lifetime of the dependent devices. There's cool stuff out there I'd love to buy but once I see it requires an Internet connection it's a no-sale for me. (Even being locally controllable isn't a win if that comes with the requirement of running a closed source native "app". I'm still sad about some 32-bit iOS apps that Apple says I can't run on newer devices. I don't want to keep nursing an iPhone 3 along to be able to control a home appliance because the manufacturer figured out they can tie their product lifecycle to Apple's user-hostile backwards compatibility policies.) Sometime in the last 20 years the tech industry became a game of tempting me with cool features and then snatching them away, versus the exciting progress I remember from the 80s and 90s. I'm sure getting older is part of it, but I can't imagine shaping my habits around technology that can be taken away from me at any time would appeal to me at a younger age either.

gh02t 3y ago
> It would be great if "smart" devices requiring access to Internet-based servers had a monthly subscription fee. Or just support a local API with a published spec. Matter is supposed to be that standard, but adoption is going slowly. Pretty sure zero people using the original reverse engineered cloud API for the Haier stuff in HA want to be using it in preference to a local API.
- rokkitmensch 3y ago
  I suspect manufacturers see this particular standard as unlocking a race to the bottom in hardware prices and so are unwilling to bite.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    But they are rolling out support. Philips is one prominent example.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Those free cloud services are indeed predatory competition. They are both bundling and dumping.
msla 3y ago
> That would serve to both insure that the servers remained up by making them economically viable for the vendor and preserve the utility of the devices This seems naïve: "Yes, it's making money, but it isn't making enough money" is the phrase on the tombstone of a lot of goods, services, and come down to it, countries through history. Being a customer is no guarantee you get to keep being a customer. > and drive manufacturers to make locally-controllable devices to appeal to price-sensitive consumers. "Special Deal: Comes With Free Six-Month Subscription With Purchase!" because six months is how long they intend to support the device, after which they turn off the service and brick all of them, and of course you can't opt out of the special deal because they don't get any of your data from a device that isn't slaved to their servers.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  > This seems naïve: "Yes, it's making money, but it isn't making enough money" is the phrase on the tombstone of a lot of goods, services, ... I'm jaded enough to know it's not a panacea. It's further along the spectrum from "This is costing us money..." at least.
- pixl97 3y ago
  At least in the EU, bricking after 6 months may cause some issues...
plagiarist 3y ago
If we're hoping for things, what about an even semi-conscious consumer base that just doesn't purchase cloud appliances? Collective action would end this problem overnight, just like it did here (although I think they are insane for buying cloud appliances in the first place).
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  The biggest risk I see to these Internet-hosted services is losing access to features (or, worse, 100% device functionality) when servers inevitably go away. That's why I won't use them. (Privacy is a concern to me too, but secondary. I wish the situation were good enough that I could worry about privacy.) What boggles my mind is how the average person seems so accepting of this. I get this pervasive sense that because "it's computers" or "computer adjacent" it's a given that you'll have to accept loss of functionality as devices age. I guess it needs to get a lot worse before it gets better.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    What does the average person know about engines in cars? Materials their houses are made of? This and about a million other complexities that are abstracted away in their lives? Needs to isn't the write term... Going to get a lot worse is going to happen. Getting better, well the issue is in doubt.
    - EvanAnderson 3y ago
      > What does the average person know about engines in cars? Materials their houses are made of? They don't know much about how those things work. They do know if they're losing functionality even if they don't know how they work. My observation is that people seem endlessly patient about losing functionality in computer adjacent devices-- far beyond what they would tolerate with other devices. I simply don't understand why this is the case. For virtually every consumer good there is some ability for independent repair. I think people would be up in arms if their car stopped working and the manufacturer said "Yeah, you just need to buy a new one". We have consumer protection laws in the US to prevent this very thing. With software connected to "smart" devices there are no significant protections. I don't think people even know to be up in arms about a device that doesn't work because it's "old" and the native app stops working or the Internet hosted servers went away. Worse, they just landfill the device and go buy the newest one. I assume it has something to do with the subsidized nature of smart phones and relatively short time people stick with a given phone. The "wow" factor of new technology probably dazzles people into forgetting about long-term usability too. Hopefully when the "throwaway" mentality of smart phones really starts to cost people (as more durable good type "smart" devices embrace this model) we'll see some public backlash.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paradox460 3y ago
While all this was happening, I was finally getting my old broken PetNet feeder working again. I wrote did it using ESPHome, and wrote up a blog post about it [1]. The relevance to this situation is that PetNet made a pretty good pet feeder about 5 years ago. It dispensed well, had a good app, and mostly just worked. Then, during 2020, the company just disappeared. The app stopped working, and eventually, the feeders stopped feeding. I tossed mine into the ever-growing box of "I'll get to it later", and forgot about it for a few years. Getting it up and running wasn't tremendously difficult, and now it works almost as well as it did when its new, working significantly better in one critical area: Instead of having to sign into some other random app and fiddle with it there, I can just press a button in HomeAssistant and my cat gets a bunch of food. Maybe later I'll wire in things like the hopper sensors, scales, and other features that the device had, but for now a 1 second pulse of power works well enough There's not really any valid reason PetNet couldn't have just released the firmware flashing keys on the way out. The device likely runs on a microcontroller very similar to ESP32/ESP8622, and so had those keys been available, I could have used the "native" hardware. I suspect the overwhelming majority of these feeders wound up in landfills, as very few people, even the technically competent, are willing to take it apart, solder in a new control board, and get said board up and running. Which is an absolute shame. [1]: https://pdx.su/blog/2024-01-19-fixing-a-broken-smart-cat-feeder-with-esp32/ https://pdx.su/blog/2024-01-19-fixing-a-broken-smart-cat-fee...
mindslight 3y ago
My take is that we need a straightforward application of anti-trust principles to stop this bundling of hardware products with cloud hosting with user-facing control software. All three of those things should be required to be three separate products, only communicating over generic protocols. Then if companies offer the cloud hosting for free or even too low cost and then decide it's untenable (or go out of business, or stop maintaining their app, etc), users can switch elsewhere and all the previously manufactured, bought, and installed devices don't turn into trash overnight.

jeroenhd 3y ago

> The only sane solution are applicances that can be controled locally without an internet connection. Agreed. I wish companies would take the work already done for them with Matter and just integrate, but if they can't, the least they could do is support the things customers to do the things they want to do.