[jsondata]

That's a fair point, and I agree. However, the reality is that a major selling point for these things is along the lines of "control it from anywhere", and whether people actually need remote access or not, it seems that a lot of consumers still see it as a major upside.

Maybe what we really need are more consumer-friendly, self-hosted (and secure) home VPN options. That way you can just run your services on the local network, and still have remote access without opening your devices to the world (or to other companies' servers). Until the average grandma can do that, the "personal cloud" idea will probably be overshadowed by manufacturers' desire to provide proprietary remote access options, because those go hand-in-hand with things like subscription pricing models, data mining, etc.

[tdkl]

Or change the marketing from cloud connected to owning the cloud. I mean, for someone who would depend on stable Internet connection to be able to control all this shit, he'd be off hosting a personal cloud on the same connection as well. Even better, because if there are operations happening in a local network and WAN goes out, the devices will still operate inside the LAN.

[theseatoms]

This sounds like the intended use case for urbit.