alt Hacker NewsIt's the bare minimum but not good enough imo. If your smart home products rely on an external server which no longer exists, the average person will never install a 3rd party firmware and self host the servers. They will just throw it in the bin.
Ideally we should just be designing products so they don't have external dependencies. A smart speaker should be able to stream over the local network on a standard protocol which doesn't rely on an external server existing. A lightbulb should be able to be paired using a generic standard without running through the OEMs servers.
Thankfully for some devices this does seem to be the trend. Matter over Thread smart devices are not dependent on proprietary hubs, apps, or external servers.
>the average person will never install a 3rd party firmware
Heres a kicker. I really dont care about the average person. I care about multimillion dollar stacks of hardware that have support rug pulled on them, leaving millions of customers stuck. I care about small businesses that invest in their communities and find themselves locked into a single vendor without the cost to overhaul their network to move to another one.
Throw your Dlink home router in the bin every 3 years. I literally dont care.
>Ideally we should just be designing products so they don't have external dependencies.
This is good too. But even then, I would apply this logic to stuff like Meraki, where major features go away if you dont buy the license. Lightbulbs are beneath my notice/contempt.