Comment by xp84

> market research indicates that most consumers think it’s a cash grab

This I 100% believe and it's so sad. I'm clearly suffering from the fact that smart home enthusiasts, while being the only ones who can even build an even remotely useful smarthome setup, are a minority, and by the numbers, probably 10x the devices are purchased by very nontechnical users who say things like "I just paid the wi-fi bill" and who would buy and return devices that need hubs. And yeah, we all need those people to make a product 'mainstream successful.'

Among enthusiasts of course, we all know a hub basically gives you (the user) control, rather than being reliant on some cloud server that will be turned off (like this article illustrates). (And they're usually like $30 so I'm astounded at how cheap people are. I've had Hue and Lutron hubs for literally 8 years and I suspect they'll last 10 more.) The problem of NAT which I didn't remember to talk about, created a lot of this, as obviously some kind of cloud thing needs to be involved for out-of-home control, but yeah, I think you and I agree that we're better off letting Apple and Google and Amazon be the cloud relays for things that connect to some device in our home that can serve as a hub.

The thing that's the most irritating is that without standards and hubs, you either have to go all in on one company's ecosystem, and none of them are the best at everything, or you have to use 12 different apps: this one for lights, this one for smoke alarms, this one for audio, this one for cameras, this one for smart speakers, this one for that one switch that you bought because they're the only one who offered a really specific type, etc.