And when the company stops wanting to pay the webservice hosting costs, you have to pay the plumber to come back and throw your useless toilet in the trash.
Worked for a company that made a kitchen appliance that had zero buttons. Needed an app. If you unplugged it without shutting it down in the app, it'd send you an alert notification. The app took at least three taps to fucking turn it off.
And the company was paying something like $1MM/yr to AWS to keep this thing running.
Once that frustrates me greatly is eight sleep. My wife had been trying various products and unfortunately eight sleep was the best executed one. But they are openly hostile to local controls.
From the time they have released people have been complaining over and over about zero local controls, suggesting buttons on the base, a remote, or even local wifi or Bluetooth controls and their people keep coming online and patronizing by claiming their engineers are working on it, but it's hard. Truth is they are passing a fucking subscription plan to use your damn bed.
Finally they came out with their local control "solution". No, buttons should not be on the base, that would be inconvenient. No, a remote control would be too easy to lose. So they implemented super dodgy earbud type controls, two taps for a tick colder, three taps for a tick warmer. Ok, janky as hell, but finally, local controls. So you get things going and do the tap and long buzz meaning "reject" the request. Turns out the taps will only process if the cloud server says it's ok, and the bed will usually be "off" and not receptive to taps unless you turn it on via Internet app or you have an Internet arranged schedule that has it on at the time you want to adjust it.
It's a shame since they otherwise had fantastic execution, but their monetization through an app strategy is maddening. So my home has one cloud based device and it pisses me off.
I found a "smart" Wi-Fi bulb in the trash and used a throwaway phone to pair it through its app. It was adjustable white and RGB, so I put it in the bathroom and thought I'd trigger it to be dim red (cicardian rhythm, you know) whenever it was night (using a built-in RTC, NTP or light sensor, whatever it was capable of). Well, nope! It only connects to Wi-Fi when powered on (understandable) and only takes orders from an external server god-knows-where, with limited local functionality (party-light cycling, WB matching, optionally remembering the last setting). It does not notify the server when its power turns on (only when switched via app or smart button) so it cannot be configured as a "smart event". The closest I could do would be to create a time event every minute:
22:00 turn on 25% red
22:01 turn on 25% red
22:02 turn on 25% red
•••
04:29 turn on 25% red
04:30 turn on 100% warm white
04:31 turn on 100% warm white
•••
21:59 turn on 100% warm white
I'm pretty sure there is a limit to timed actions so I can't just do it this way. I guess I know why it got trashed while still working as intended.
I'll be looking into Home Automation *Assistant and see if there is a compatible firmware to flash on this piece of shit. Or I'll just use my electrical engineering skills to combine red and orange LEDs into another bulb and give it a separate switch. *(Edit)
I'm having to replace my bathroom speaker controller because something about my new Pixel phone doesn't like them. The app won't run under modern android, and doesn't even connect via Bluetooth.