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Smart devices are turning out to be a poor investment (www.androidpolice.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 112 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Smart devices are only useful if they are open source and everything can be self hosted. Everything else becomes a brick when the manufacturer drops support for it.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Exactly, I have been using some of the same zwave devices for over 10 years. I don't buy anything that needs the Internet unless I don't have a choice and that device is not mission critical. I build many of my devices with esp home also.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    For now, hubitat seems to be a good balance between slowly improving the support and experience vs. price paid. I opted in for their subscription that does automatic backups with recovery to a different device and managed remote access and I'm satisfied with the value received for the subscription fee.

    I doubt this will last; if they get successful enough, somebody will buy them like the Samsung / Smartthings scenario and the enshittification will begin (or accelerate, depending on your opinion of the status quo).

    Hopefully by then homeseer has a robust hardware ecosystem and migrating isn't very painful.

    And the author is right, no need to touch Matter at this point if you're already vested in Z-Wave or ZigBee.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago

    But they can't sell you more shit if they didn't have planned obsolescence baked in!
    (It's a little sobering realizing that technology is old enough to be, you know, OLD. Nothing about this is novel to anybody anymore. We're way, way past being impressed by two lines batting a dot around.)

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago*

    Unfortunately self-hosting requires a technical level that the vast majority doesn't have or wish to develop. I totally understand why some people don't want to fuck around with their own digital infrastructure, it's a huge pain in the ass sometimes, and when something goes wrong (at it will at some point) you can quickly get to a place where the skill to get it running is nowhere near enough to fix it.

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