Sadly the "IoT" market is practically predicated on selling some hideously expensive service that you don't want or need on top of a piece of hardware that would be perfectly happy working against a home edge gateway rather than "the cloud". Approaching a VC asking for money for digital lightbulbs and dimmers that work against a local server running on a Wifi-router-like-box? Using a standardized protocol, so you don't need 10 different home edge gateways to orchestrate different tasks? Get out, we don't even want to hear it...
Accessing the Internet should add features - not having the Internet should not burden or brick the device.
An admittedly expensive solution would be to use the Ethereum main network to communicate with the IoT device.
For example, a local administration page that can be accessed within the LAN, and which can then be proxied by the provider. In the case that the provider goes out of business you lose the remote control (unless setting up your own VPN) but the device won't be bricked.
Unfortunately, I imagine some companies intentionally avoid doing this to require customers to pay a subscription fee.
I'd love to see someone provide a pre-packaged zwave/zigbee talking home assistant appliance with support for snips.ai voice control. Unfortunately, hardware-wise it would probably cost $250 to build out of off the shelf components, but perhaps at scale it could be affordable? Google and Amazon are selling their closed, cloud chained voice assistants for practically below cost, though, so I don't know how such a product could really compete.
Being put out of commission by downed servers is still pretty terrible, but intentionally bricking the devices is a separate further step to me (and has been done by other companies).
Call it "negligent bricking"?
In the current IoT landscape, I feel like you have to either go with the biggest players that have the best chance of surviving or hack everything together yourself to work locally.
Both Nest and Logitech have bricked old products.
I think the only way the industry survives is if consumers understand that they are not just buying the ‘thing,’ but also a license to the software that powers it. Some SW licenses are open source, some require a monthly fee, and some are sold ‘as-is.’
I've had dozens of lightbulbs affected by TCP Lighting and Homebrite choosing not to support them anymore. They can't be accessed from the internet anymore and their schedule can't be changed.
The worst, though, is TCP. Someone reverse engineered the API to the home hub, and shortly after TCP pushed a software update to everyone's hub encrypting the software. Then they terminated the service. So, they bricked the device in slow motion.
This is why when I buy new bulbs, I'm only going with HomeKit stuff. Apple's not going anywhere. And while it likes you to have the latest, greatest stuff it at least provides updates for its iOS devices for five years. Hopefully that's an indication of the longevity of HomeKit connectivity.
