Sonos’ app is another example of this. As a very brief tl;dr if anyone isn’t aware of it, Sonos is a wireless speaker company that can group speakers in different rooms into zones, so you can have different music playing in different rooms, or all the same, or at different volumes, etc. The quality isn’t going to blow away audiophiles, but IMO they’re legitimately great.

The original design had the speakers setting up a private mesh network, and the app would send commands directly to the speakers via your LAN. Then, they got the brilliant idea to route commands via their cloud service. The app would send commands to an endpoint, which would send them back to your speakers. Imagine trying to smoothly fade volume with a WAN hop. This went over as well as you’d expect, and they’ve since promised to work on performance. Thus far they seem to have been doing so; it isn’t as snappy as the original, but it’s quite a bit better.

So many developers do this, and it's infuriating. I have a device sitting there on my perfectly good LAN, yet if I want to remote control it, the brilliant software decides to send the commands to the Internet, then back to my device, then the response gets routed to the Internet, and back to my phone.

Device developers, stop doing this! You people realize that LANs exist, don't you?

I was doing firmware + mobile a at large-ish startup a decade ago. Same story as Sonos; there was a push to go all cloud instead of our local network implementation that worked great.

I argued breathlessly against it for days. I’ll never forget the sales chad raising his voice to shut me down with a cop-out:“This is the way the industry is going!”.

It’s not the developers making these changes.

And look what happened to Sonos soon after that! I’m sorry, but I’ve gotten to the point where I would’ve just yelled back at the guy “Prove it, chudmuffin! You’re advocating for something you know nothing about and sending the company in a disastrous direction which will lead to its demise. If your idea is so great, then you prove it’s better than decades of established precedent at the largest companies in the world.” Then watch their head asplode and challenge me to a fistfight in the parking lot. Yes, I’ve had that happen with a sales “guy.”

Not saying that’s what you could or would have done, I’ve just gotten to the point in life where I’m alreaover it, ready to throw it back at them. Maybe it’s from living in this part of the world, but our plumber said “always be ready for people to be mean to you“ and while it doesn’t make for a very peaceful life, it certainly makes for fun ripping heads off.

if they route your requests via their cloud, they have you by the balls, that's the whole point

As I said at [1] they want to centralise it as a control point so they can monetize it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376040

Developers know better, but they are overridden by management and suits. Which pays their salary, showing that doing better usually gets sidelined by doing what’s good for you.

I'm not letting the developers entirely off the hook. At many companies, they are decision makers too, and partially share the blame with their product leadership and other decision makers.

Unpopular Opinion, but if you have absolutely zero say in the content of what you're developing, and just take orders from JIRA, you shouldn't call yourself an engineer. You should also keep your eyes open for a better job.

Agreed. Plus, if you can get an entire team to tell the PM “this is fucking stupid, we aren’t doing it,” what are they gonna do - axe an entire team? I doubt it. Maybe at big companies, but small ones? Nah.

Realistically companies just start an outsourcing operation if this happens and employ people who live in fear for pittance.

I have a large and varied experience of “developers”. The majority aren’t any more morally virtuous than a brick. They wake up, get down to the sausage factory and make sausages.

Again this is mostly our biases playing us. Within HN and similar communities there are a lot of above average and caring developers. Those who don’t care aren’t going to be here to look like they do.

LANs effectively don’t exist. If you want to sell a speaker system useful to the general public, you’re going to have to deal with:

- Access points that don’t let WiFi devices talk to wired devices.

- Office networks that don’t repeat broadcast discovery traffic into different segments.

- People in McMansions who don’t understand extenders and use two different SSIDs for each half of their house or for indoor vs poolside.

- Phone is on cellular network, speaker is on WiFi, “controls don’t work”

- Network teams who won’t “open the ports” or configure mDNS or Zeroconf or Bonjour but will let port 443 to the internet.

- people who want to turn their speakers on at home while they are at work, for their dog.

- people who want to turn their speakers off at their second home after they returned from holiday and left the pool party music playing.

- diagnostic logs that would be nice if they went somewhere.

- People who lost their phone and want a website on their laptop to control their speakers.

- people who have their speakers nicked and want to login to your website to see their speakers checking in and “remote wipe” block them.

- People who want the status of all their speakers live in their phone app, even the ones at other properties.

- tons of buggy low quality, low cost, network devices (switches, hubs, cables, routers, firewalls, NATs).

Just about the only thing which is used enough to be reasonably trustable on any random customer network is HTTPS to the big CDNs and Cloud providers.

wow really? is this only for newer speakers or do older gen speakers work this way too

The older speakers are stuck on an older version of the app (it’s a wholly different app, called S1) which doesn’t have that behavior AFAIK.

I think it's worth noting that Sonos wanted to brick all those older speakers, and only backed away from that because of bad PR.