A raspberry pi has more processing power than's needed to search and store email. ... etc etc
This trope is absolute bullshit. What people want is for stuff to work and, if stuff doesn't work, for it to be someone else's fault and/or be easy to fix.
Self-hosting fails massively at the second criterion there. Right now, if a cellphone breaks, you can just get a new one and your contacts, messages, apps, etc all sync back to it. Done, you're back on your feet.
If you have self-hosted email or smart-home-stuff, the failure modes are much worse, and you're far less likely to have someone else to blame.
Also, a raspberry pi does not have enough power to do good voice recognition, not to the level of siri/alexa/google.
It also doesn't have enough storage to cache all your music, videos you may wish to play on the TV, etc, so some external cloud integration will be needed regardless.
Self hosting has failed. People use gmail, not postfix. People use spotify, not cds or local mp3 players. People use netflix, not blurays. People use google search to find previously seen info, not a locally saved and curated archive of websites or a home-grown card catalog system. People use facebook to communicate, not diaspora.
> it is trivial to create a more user friendly device
This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success... but things like sandstorm.io, yunohost, and others have been incredibly complex projects and have not really succeeded. It's clearly not trivial since those people have collectively thrown millions of dollars and dozens of man-years at the problem with no glimmer of hope.
The closest we have to success in this space, I'd say, is NASs which ship owncloud... and those have not caught in for the average household at all.
It's not understandable nor acceptable if my appliance within my home with no inherent external dependencies doesn't work unless that link to somewhere else is working.
> This is obviously false or else devices like this would have been trivial to make and seen some success...
Rubbish. There's simply more economic incentive for companies to create devices which siphon off usage data for them to sell.
I’ll buy cynicism around the data collection aspects of these things but one only need to look to the desktop application marketplace to see the broader trend.
I’ve supported both self hosted & cloud hosted products for money. I know which one I prefer to work on and I’m surprised anyone in tech would disagree.
If my nest isn't connected to the internet, I can still go over to it and turn it and the heat will come on (or go off). If my smoke detectors can't talk to the internet, they'll still work like a regular smoke detector. And even control my Nest through it's own mesh network (If I want them to). I can't speak from experience, but I'd bet that my garage door remote will still operate the door even without a wifi network to sell my open/close times to the highest bidder.
Regardless, I don't think Craftsman is interested in my garage door habits; they're interested in selling me a new garage door that I otherwise wouldn't think I'd need to upgrade. Smart home functionality is just one way to get that sale in. And it apparently works.
None of these things will kill you if they happen not to work or have serious drawbacks.
Software update to Nest could have literally killed people and caused thousands of dollars of property damage. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-g...
Or maybe everything you say is being recorded and sent to Google all the time. http://bgr.com/2017/10/11/google-home-mini-spying-on-user-fi...
I'll stick with my dumb appliances thanks.
FWIW, dumb appliances could have done the same thing.
A furnace that stops working in the dead of winter while away can still burst your pipes if they get cold enough, a broken appliance (and an operator unwillingly to change the situation) can still cause someone to freeze the death or suffer from a deadly heatstroke.
This particular issue cited first probably has mostly to do with the fact that nest really wants you to have a 24V power source for the thermostat (A "C" or "Common Wire"). They've figured out how to make it work without for most systems, but that relies on an internal battery.
Wasn’t that C wire issue causing Nests to continuously turn on the furnace causing homes to get too hot?
Spotify is a good example of something that could work identically to what it does today self-hosted. No change anywhere, no extra setup at all, except for the fact that storing the entire spotify library is impractical.
When I talked about a more user-friendly device I meant something of a smart-home controller. Not a general purpose script that glues together some open source packages that each require a weekend of setup from an enthusiast... No, that none of those has taken off doesn't surprise me the least (that doesn't mean they are useful or that I could see myself using one, but it is not for average Joe).
Of course the average "smart" lock is unlikely to be engineered with such considerations in mind and I doubt that the extra effort would pay off financially, but it isn't completely impossible.
This allowed them to (a) not run a power wire to every door; (b) use a long (12 digits) passcode; (c) reprogram passcodes in a few seconds; (d) immediately give feedback on whether you had typed in the right code or not.
IIRC they cost upwards of $500 each. Given that there was already a 24/7 human guard to check you in and out, I'm not sure that they made a smart decision over physical metal keys.
Meanwhile, I have a non-networked, non-wireless electronic combo lock on the front door of my house. It's not hackable without physical contact; if you want to break in, smashing a window is a better route. It's powered by a 9-volt battery and lasts about 4 years per battery.
The big win is never forgetting to carry a key, with a smaller bonus of being able to give friends individually revocable passcodes.
Personally I don't see much use in smart locks for my home, but if I did have one I imagine I'd still use a regular key and carry it with me all the time. The smart lock could still provide benefits such as allowing visiting friends to enter without key etc.
Being able to remotely control and monitor the heat and water is awesome for the vacation house, but that is only in addition to using the physical knobs. It should not increase the risk (but in practice the security in such devices are terrible and you need to be somewhat knowledgeable to even assess the risk introduced).
You are completely correct. But 99% of people don't know / can't be bothered to host their own. Googlezonbook will create a near frictionless experience and suddenly you'll need an internet connection to open your front door.
You still need to connect the power cord and connect to ethernet or wifi (end regardless of whether it is a cloud device or self-hosted device you can configure wifi from your smartphone like the chromecast).
A smart-home-controller is a physical device. You buy it, you provide power and connect ethernet and configure wifi. Now, either the controller relies on the cloud or it doesn't.
If it is completely reliant on the cloud you will have to muck about with registering, if it is completely self-hosted you don't. Simple as that.
EDITED REMOVING A REVERIE TO MY PROFILE, my apologies, often carried away when I'm enjoying the topics here, it's not my wish to spoil the flow as I almost did.
This said, I will surely be delighted to hear from anyone regarding my rather wistful wishes, to which I applied months of health enforced downtime last year. I still think the qualified opportunity isn't a total wash and would be willing to invest in a no tears no recriminations study, later in the year.
About the necessity of a WAN and firmware etc updating your home automation system: are we not in cities now at sufficient density where peer to peer hops in a as hoc network, has become a technical possibility that maybe lacks a sufficient motivation?
As opposed to ordinary users running their own services?
The only reason I don't see more routers with default passwords is that people will use whatever comcast and the like provide to them, and that provider will randomize passwords.
If people cannot even configure their router, how are they going to configure self-hosted solutions?
It makes total sense to go with a local solution like yours, however when all the control is done through the cloud (http://home.nest.com, Siri, Alexa), it kinda negates the usefulness of it, except for momentary internet connection loss. And it makes it 12x more complicated for the Average Joe ("What's a Raspberry Pie?", "Local network configurations?", "I don't even know my router's password...").
Various smart features should fail safe anyway, if that is true then "reliable enough" doesn't have to be all that high a bar. Of course most people won't put up with rebooting their house once a week, so it isn't that low of a bar either.
It probably already relies on the “electric cloud” and perhaps the “ gas cloud” already so what makes a dependency on a “computing cloud”any different?
Chance of a Revolv IOT Home Hub working for the next 5 years: 0.000% this has literally already been shut down.
Caveat emptor.
It's not like we'll all wake up Jan 1 2019 and have nothing but cloud-connected home appliances. It'll be an iterative process, and slower than phone/VCR adoption because fridges and the like are slowly-replaced so-called "white goods".
You can still press the light switch if the net goes out.
You can't troubleshoot problems in every single person's home, but you can troubleshoot problems in the cloud.
Self-hosted is the only acceptable alternative here where even the raspberry pi has more processing power to run hundreds of homes.
A simple service to route mobile apps through the potential NAT is the only thing the cloud should be needed for. Obviously downloading "drivers"/configurations are a valid user case but that's part of the setup-process.
Not saying that everyone should tinkle with a RPI but it is trivial to create a more user friendly device. The fact that Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don't even attempt this is just a consequence of them being hell bent on making money from crap.