These choices Nest has made simplifies the SW stack, UX & provides for better security at the cost of mandating a physical fallback rather than a LAN fallback. You may see things differently but that doesn't mean these aren't valid engineering tradeoffs.
Well it sounds like tradeoffs that make the engineer's life easier.
Maybe they should actually tackle the harder challenge of getting their supposedly smart devices to work in a heterogenous networking environment.
That would be a real innovation.
I'm also unclear why you are claiming the only gains are in maintenance. Security is a real end-user benefit & having devices not allow arbitrary incoming network connections is a security choice. Similarly, arbitrating everything through the web results in a simpler, more reliable, enrolment process & makes it easy to add customer features like family control more easily, securely & reliably. These are all customer-facing advantages.
2 hours out of a year is still 3, almost 4, 9s of uptime. That's probably better than your home network/ISP.
I get it. You personally would prefer they traded off for supporting direct connection to your phone. However, that doesn't invalidate that there are legitimate engineering reasons someone might choose other tradeoffs.
The only reason these "smart" devices can exist is because the market hasn't matured and customers don't know any better.
A bit off topic, but I am hoping one day the always-on in-home server takes off for the average user so that my ability to expose my in-home server to the public internet is no longer a minority skill.
For the equivalent effort to implement, most customer's revealed preferences are for new/better features rather than robust local intelligence.
This kind of event just doesn't happen very often.
While it may not happen very often, I wonder how many customers (like me) they lose because the customers do not want their devices to even have internet access but still want local remote control (and are willing to sacrifice non-local remote control).
I guess ideally they would utilize a more localized protocol when you're nearby and then fall back to control->remote server->device when you're not.
(In case it's not clear, many of the reasons devices use cloud rendezvous have to do with NATs and firewalls and the difficulty of doing direct node-to-node communication in today's very fragmented Internet. Not all - some are security and complexity.)
