I definitely would invest into Smart Home, but only if I can control it 100% from the server in my basement without the appliance having any internet access at all.
All my IoT devices are in a wifi without any internet access.
It's true that they're mostly proprietary, and Apple runs its own services, and I hate iTunes these days.
But—and I realize not everyone feels the same way—but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy.
They feel to me—and again, not everyone agrees—they feel to me like the only hardware company that thinks of their users as their customers, and not as cattle to be sold to crapware vendors and search engine behemoths.
>but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy
I can think of a few: Purism, System76, OSMC, Mycroft... they're smaller and less well-known than the big players of course, and they're not all perfect, but they treat their users as customers unlike many companies these days.
If I wouldnt be using Android Phones with custom Roms and no Google at all, I would proably also be using iPhones. I just try to stay all open source. I pay for my email, I have my own servers with services I use etc.
Devices that don't connect to a 3rd party servers in the first place aren't dependant on the good will of the manufacturer to remain privacy conscious.
Right now Apple makes buckets of cash from their hardware, but if they ever need to tighten their belt you can bet that the extra revenue from selling your data will be extremely tempting.
I don't touch 90% of WiFi smart devices unless they are Tuya controlled and even then I'm iffy. I vastly prefer z-wave/zigbee because if SmartThings goes belly up I can switch to Wink or any other compatible hub fairly easily. And while my Alexa devices are probably where I am "weakest" I have a lot of stuff running through HomeBridge and if I needed to I could move to HomeAssistant if I needed/wanted to.
Honestly? That would be awesome. I already have security cameras set up like that (although not wireless) - just home devices that do things for me and report back to a central server in my home. That server can connect to the internet (when I want it to), grab new firmware for the cameras, then disconnect and send out the firmware.
That's pretty much all I want from home automation as well. I see the value in being able to say "Alexa, turn down the lights" and having AWS do the voice recognition - but given that I can't trust services to stay more than a few years, I'm not going to invest in it.
Well, IoT never was a customer term, it was an industry term. And just because something keeps working without the internet doesn't mean it cannot benefit from connectivity.
Most things in your home don't need to know that much about things outside your home, or could have a well-defined standard API for getting that information from any source. If you could write wrapper scripts for obtaining weather information or traffic information, for instance, then you could have a self-contained system that required no monthly fees unless you opted to pay for high quality information, etc. but still gained all of the benefits of outside information, is high security, and would probably end up working even better. You could have default information endpoints for ease of setup, but why not make it all customizable? A good company with customer needs in view would be fully capable of making such a system.
In office buildings, devices already talk to each other using a network, so you don't have miles of cables from each switch to light or window-blind. In cars too, with CAN Bus.
Apple sells Apple Home Hub, I wonder if that's their "central control system" so that the Apple Home devices can be a bit dumber, but also it means there's a central firewall and system that can look for updates.
Also if you can install the "cloud-end" on your own device, when the company goes Nest, it means you can at least run an old version to keep your "IoT" gadget running, and it'll be running on the (hopefully) firewalled local hub.
Apple doesn't sell a "home hub" product. But their smart speaker (HomePod), TV set top box (Apple TV) and tablets (iPad) can all function as a gateway for HomeKit devices to be securely controlled from outside the LAN without the devices themselves having to be very smart or secure.
IIRC, there was AirPort, which was / is a wireless router that had options for things like storing device backups or similar.
Totally feasible to make a killer wireless AP that's Apple branded and connects better to the ecosystem, but that doesn't seem to be the direction Apple is going.
Yep, they had a range of WiFi routers, including one with a built-in harddisk for backups. They stopped updating them before they launched HomeKit though, so it never supported that.
It's a shame they stopped investing in them and missing the whole mesh Wi-Fi development. Also in this age where they're touting "privacy first" and iTunes is on the endangered list, not supporting iOS device backups over a LAN is a huge deficiency.
There are a few other products I use (for blinds, windows, heat), but you can often simply search the above two lists and read through the documentation whether they need internet (or "cloud") access or whether theyre totally local.
Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant, and it's free for OpenHAB.
I personally prefer OpenHAB over HomeAssistant, but the thing that annoys me about OpenHAB2 is that it doesn't have even rudimentary built in user management with authentication. The docs basically tell you to use something like Nginx to do that for you.
> Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant
if you want a super simple setup, they have manual guides for setting it up. And if you just want remote access and don't need Alexa/Google integration, it almost as simple manually.
Following a nearby lightning strike that destroyed our broadband router, I was pleasantly surprised to find that our Hive controllers still worked and scheduled water and heating correctly. Did also make me find the physical buttons for turning stuff on/off as well - though that didn't turn out to be necessary.
I'm mainly going for Z-Wave plus, using Home Assistant as controller for now (though still evaluating that).
My A/C is on Wifi though, and the cloudy controller web page is using a REST API (undocumented but simple enough to sniff and fake), so that's the only outlier so far.
I really want to love HA, but I find doing things in Node-Red so much quicker and easy to comprehend due to its visual nature. After a gap of about a year, I installed HA again a few weeks back and tried to setup geofencing using first bluetooth and then third party location services, but gave up due to the inconsistent determination of whether I was home or not. Using Node-red and a couple of tutorials I had things working very quickly. YMMV.
I'm doing this as well. Z-Wave+ and a Raspberry Pi for the hub for my first automation device, an RGBW LED strip for my home office lighting.
Even if I wanted to pay a subscription fee to some external service for my hub, the risk of service disruption, hacking of my network, and/or misappropriation of my personal data are just too high.
It's the opposite of interchangeable.