The sensor feedback to stop washing is an old feature common for many years. Automatically measuring detergent could be marginally useful if it worked better th

The sensor feedback to stop washing is an old feature common for many years. Automatically measuring detergent could be marginally useful if it worked better than human judgement but it’s hard to implement and it’s saving only a few seconds per load, so most people are never going to see a benefit relative to how much more expensive it’d make the machines. Worse, it’s changing a washing machine from a standalone device to an internet-connected computer which needs to regularly get software updates. That adds not just cost but increases the odds that something unrelated to the core functionality will break and make the machine unusable. It also makes them much harder to setup and adds privacy concerns: the last Samsung washing machine I used had an amazingly clunky setup process which required a number of ToS prompts allowing them to resell your data and they insist that you need to grant their app all kinds of permissions on your phone (background location tracking, local network access, Bluetooth scanning, etc.) as part of that process. I am pretty confident that the machine will break before I would ever see a net time savings from not having to measure detergent manually relative to their setup process. I would also be profoundly unsurprised if they get breached or abuse their data collection practices in some way which would be impossible with a regular standalone device. These features are not being added to satisfy user demand and the real customers don’t care about things like privacy or security unless it costs more than they’re making.