Or what happens when GCP/AWS/Azure have a bad day and you lose connectivity with your API servers?
Your second point about GCP/AWS/Azure going down is really valid. When we started the company, we saw a few off-the-shelf gateways that relied on a permanent MQTT connection to function correctly, and from our Sonder experience, we knew that this was a non-starter for some of our early customers. Instead, we ended up creating our own hub and we run a ton of logic that runs entirely locally. For example, if an Airbnb reservation comes in, the hub immediately receives the door lock programming instructions even if the reservation is far out in the future. Our hub doesn't program the lock yet, but when the reservation time window arrives, the lock gets programmed by the hub irrespective of whether the internet or AWS is up/down.
[1] well at this point, it's questionable whether we should refer to, for example, wildfires as Black Swan events. But I think you'll agree that most people aren't interested in touring a new home or staying at an Airbnb when the town next door is on fire...
And yeah props for that solution to intermittent connectivity issues :)
My current complex specified that I had to supply internet and some other things for their smart hub service, although that turned out to not be the case (it's not on my network and works), but it was really weird to have that clause but it not match reality because I was effectively signing a document saying I was responsible for it.
Fwiw, we haven't run into cases yet where landlords want to leave our hub inside a unit once it has been rented out. I think there are pros/cons to it from a security/privacy standpoint. It can also be very convenient and reduce certain OPEX costs (e.g. insurance). But there are horror stories out there of some of the cheap OEM hubs that get deployed [1] and we (Seam) would want to have a solid conversation internally first to see what's the right approach here.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/02/smart-home-hub-flaws-unloc...
Here's the wording if you're interested:
https://i.imgur.com/qF22wG9.jpg
Plus even though it says "If you elect to purchase..." half-way down, I basically had no option but to walk away from the lease entirely. They wouldn't remove them, turn them off and replace with a physical lock, or anything else.
