Long term reliance on IOT manufacturers

J.pilkington

Like many others on here I'm on an expensive journey to automate my home (no thanks to this sub forum which has no end of expensive recommendations), I have hedged my bets (not on purpose to be honest) and am now using multiple brands which include:
- Nest
- TP-Link
- Salus
- Philips Hue
- Echo
- Withings

Is anyone else worried about the future of these companies? We all happy to pay the upfront cost for their products but rarely willing to pay an ongoing subscription which these companies need to run their servers (which we all use every time we use their products) / roll out security upgrades / new features. As I type this these companies models almost sound like pyramid schemes, ie they need new customers to keep their old customers happy.

Anyone else consider this when buying or are we happy to buy and hope that we get a few years out of the product by which time it will be obsolete and we buy the latest product that is on the market at that time.

bk

This is why I generally buy products which aren't overly reliant on cloud services and should continue to work even if the companies go under.

For instance, if Philips goes under, you might lose remote access, but everything else should continue to work fine via the bridge.

Also I prefer well established leaders in their field with a long history, then startups.

Philips, one of the biggest manufacturers of LED's and lighting in the world, so a good bet.

TP-Link long history of making routers, networking gear, etc.

Nest is a strange one, obviously owned by Google, so lots of money there. But Google has a habit of killing off no core products and Nest is definitely non core, so the leaves me a little nervous about them. Though I'd assume they would sell it off rather then just kill it.

Nothing I bought it so tied in and critical that if need be I couldn't quickly and easily replace it if need be. Obviously that sucks in terms of money invested, but

BTW most cloud services for IoT services use insanely little amounts of resources in the cloud. Usually they are just connecting DHCP services. A cent or two per year per device to run those services.

The one exception is services that involve video, like IP cameras, that uses a lot of resources.

So it is a good concern to have, but something that can be worked around in most cases IMO.

Jim2007

Most of what you are investing in will be obsolete in a few years anyway so why worry???

fiachra06

I'm just getting started in this area and I'm trying to negate the need for as many cloud services as I can. Primarily, I've got Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi as my central hub and my gateway for remote access. The products I plan to pick, or in some cases build myself, will hopefully mesh with that. I just got an Echo (which is great), and I don't see Amazon going down the tubes any time soon, but even in the worst case it's only one of a number of peripherals I can use to control my system.

Scriptiee

I will have to, somewhat, agree with Jim2007 on this. IOT sector is not even in it's infancy currently, it's just bunch of companies dabbing it in as it is the buzz word currently. Growth of the sector is somewhat linked to the adoption of IPv6, and when that happens we will see an explosion of automation just like it happened to computers 20 odd years ago. So yeah, anything you buy now will most probably be obsolete in few years, however, that does not imply it won't be usable. Might not have full range of features but should still mostly work.

I'm currently in a process to attempt to automate the home I'm currently in, even though the building quality of the place is not helping, and decided to go the self made route. Like fiachra06 mostly using RPi (v3, Zero W), Arduino, Sonoff, and other components. MQTT, MyCroft and plain ol python software wise. Basically attempting to not rely on cloud services wherever I can afford to. This does of course require you to maintain all this yourself and have some knowledge for setup and maintenance. And leaves you in charge of patching, updating, and security of it all.

Basically looking for as much open source solutions with decent sized communities I can find as these will probably stay supported for foreseeable future.

Nelbert

I've a Vera Edge. It's a z wave controller. Biggest concern would be a Vera shutting up shop (them being bought would probably mean a controller upgrade or something).

It gives me full local access though and worst case for me is changing to another controller that supports Z wave (or switching to one of the open source solution with a USB z wave controller added to my Synology NAS).
Only rely on Vera for remote access which I could have working via VPN (already have one setup) to my home network or if replacing the controller port forwarding etc.

It would be a pain but lots of options and I'll probably buy the USB z wave plugin as a backup in the next while anyway. Could switch to Samsung smart things easily too.