Genuinely everything. It's like a whole program on just "how to find the newest worst way to be a human being".

You don't need it make water hot even. Just to have recipes and guides and other useless shit that loses its novelty after 3 minutes.

Great short story called Unauthorized Bread Abt that exact thing, it's a weirdly realistic look at what a dystopian corporate future would look like

I am all for smart appliances, as long as they are local and work with things like home assistant

I've still got my old Anova, Bluetooth one. I don't even use the app ever, I can set it up with the wheel and buttons. Still works great after like 5+ years. That said, I won't be recommending them to anyone going forward.

On top of that they spy on you and sell your data

I like it. I'm going to start calling it that now. Why are we tiptoing around their corporate feelings? They forcing these things to become obsolete in contravention of what is best for the consumer.

Agreed! This is just the beginning, I'm convinced this was the plan all along for most smart devices. I will make an exception for products that can be conveniently operated when an account/app is optional at least.

Or make sure you can hook it to something like home assistant without reliance on cloud…

The most bastardly thing they could do, right? The explanation is that processing costs money, so wifi via cloud only bullshit is getting expensive. Also, we're disabling the only other viable alternative, effectively bricking all remote features intentionally. Why? Fuck you, that's why.

The app is rubbish & always has been so no real loss. But this, disabling a core hardware feature!? Dick move Anova, dick move…

To be honest, I have a Bluetooth kettle and it's kinda pointless, it reliably works only when I'm in the same room, at that point I can just watch the temperature on the 7digit LED display

The process: I'm on the sofa/bed and I want to know if the kettle is done. I open the app and it's "connecting... Connecting...", the spinner spins for minutes until it times out. So I need to get up the lazy ass and go to the kitchen, try again the connection, it takes another 30 seconds. If I did it without the app I would have saved 3-4 minutes of rage. Because anyway it doesn't even allow remote start (for safety, I understand), just remote monitoring. Now I just set a timer on the phone and ignore the app connection

Hot take: this is why Android > iOS. When an app developer removes offline features you just manually install an old APK and you're done 👍

"But you can sideload apps and manually renew the self signed certificate every week on iOS too" - is going to be the reply to this post. Sure, because renewing the certificate every week from my Mac is so convenient (it can't be done from the iPhone itself - unless you configure a VPN to use someone else's computer and give them your credentials)

in no way related to the sous vide cooker