Comment by drdaeman

Oh, well, forget all that bullshit please. I can see how that "smart" is utter nonsense no one possibly wants. If you need an app and Internet connection to operate a home appliance that's stupid, not smart. Crapware vendors really ruined it.

Instead, please imagine your dishwasher has a standardized management and observation API that's exposed on a LAN and can be consumed by your local IoT management software (e.g. Home Assistant). Nothing here should have any WAN connectivity, except for a tightly firewalled channel for out-of-home user communications.

I run dishwasher overnight (YMMV) and I have forgot to turn the dishwasher on more than once before going to bed. It would be nice if it would be able to either start on a ping from a home hub's cron if it's loaded, has detergent and locked. Or if it's not in a good state, when the home hub would sense I'm about to start my night routine it could notify me that I forgot to do something about the dishes.

Or consider a smart washing machine. Home hub can observe its state and home automation can actually remind you that you forgot to move the wet clothes to the dryer. Or, well, if we're considering advanced robotics, it could summon a service bot with appropriate manipulators to do it for me.

Or a smart kitchen stove. If the hub senses I'm going out and the stove or oven are running, it should bug the hell out of me before I'm out of the driveway.

That's what I mean when I say "smart". Unobtrusive, helpful home automation, doing what I actually want from it, not doing anything I don't explicitly want, designed to be reliable, private and fault-tolerant.

Smart home should be about dwellers convenience and automatically meeting their expectations (as defined by dwellers themselves), not a data siphoning mess with constant risk of security breaches, that becomes dysfunctional if someone else's computer (cloud) fails.