[connicpu]

Absolutely agree, I didn't get a single smart home device until I was certain I could have full local control and that it would work until the day the hardware failed. I started out making my own custom IoT controllers with ESP8266 chips that I wrote arduino code for, but while fun it isn't scalable to my whole house. In the last couple months I got a Home Assistant Yellow which has a built-in Zigbee radio, so my world was opened to so many local-only devices. Now I've replaced the majority of my lightswitches and put zigbee smart bulbs in a lot of my lamps, and it's all controlled from my Home Assistant instance, not a single proprietary app installed.