Meta note: I think we should be angrier at Apple and Google over this. It’s in their interest to push everyone and everything to the cloud (their clouds ideally) and so they never pushed for great local connectivity solutions in their phone OSes.
There’s not really a good reason why it has to be hard for a device to connect to a nearby phone over some reliable signal, eg a home’s existing wifi network. (HN disclaimer: yeah yeah, i know it’s possible, but it’s a big hassle and the UX sucks so a manufacturer is effectively forced to go cloud if they want a device to be controllable from an app). The industry could have long developed some fancy protocol/system over wifi intended for just that. But device manufacturers aren’t strong enough to push for that in networking land, and Apple/Google/Microsoft have an interest against “local” becoming a normal thing normal people can figure out.
I feel like this is what regulation should be about. Instead of demanding that companies open source their systems if they go under, IMO we should have rules saying that smart devices shouldn’t need internet access for controlling them from nearby. If rules like that are in place, a push for a way to make the UX for that as good as it is via some cloud server will automatically happen.
I mean. I've owned several IoT devices that work either locally or over the internet. Some of this you can just blame on local networks being fiddly in ways that are difficult to control.
Over local network it's an unreliable assumption that device A can discover device B through some form of broadcast. There are ways to intentionally or unintentionally block that. And then even if you know each party's IP, some networks will intentionally isolate different users for security reasons.
Is it an Apple/Android limitation or a more basic networking limitation that drives devices to communicate with centralized servers on the internet?
> Over local network it's an unreliable assumption that device A can discover device B through some form of broadcast.
Yes and I’m 100% sure people at wifi consortia and the likes could design a thing that fixes that. They came up with DHCP which smells vaguely like this, I’m sure there’s a way.
There’s not really a good reason why it has to be hard for a device to connect to a nearby phone over some reliable signal, eg a home’s existing wifi network. (HN disclaimer: yeah yeah, i know it’s possible, but it’s a big hassle and the UX sucks so a manufacturer is effectively forced to go cloud if they want a device to be controllable from an app). The industry could have long developed some fancy protocol/system over wifi intended for just that. But device manufacturers aren’t strong enough to push for that in networking land, and Apple/Google/Microsoft have an interest against “local” becoming a normal thing normal people can figure out.
I feel like this is what regulation should be about. Instead of demanding that companies open source their systems if they go under, IMO we should have rules saying that smart devices shouldn’t need internet access for controlling them from nearby. If rules like that are in place, a push for a way to make the UX for that as good as it is via some cloud server will automatically happen.