Comment by inanutshellus 2 days ago
TODAY I got an email saying my $600 robot vacuum cleaner -- which only works via an app -- would no longer work with said app.
It has no physical buttons to manage schedules, just a "spot clean now" button.
I hand-wrung when I bought it -- knowing it was a risk requiring I trust them -- aand I was bitten.
Awesome.
Welcome to the future.
I think those who believe regulation is universally the devil forget the era where products were received DOA and customers had no recourse while companies simply called it profit.
I can't take anyone that views regulation as universally evil seriously when history is full of stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radithor
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9176267>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44508062>
The Radithor reference is of course quite apropos, and I'm a fan of effective and principled regulation to avoid that and numerous other market failures.
Sorry, but it's CUS-TO-MERS. They buy stuff that can only be controlled via an app talking to the cloud. They buy stuff that cannot be repaired. They buy stuff that openly lies about its specs, for an "unbelievably good price". The customers go for the cheapest, all else be damned.
Education in general, and about critical thinking in particular, could help.
Your argument is in alignment with
* "There's a sucker born every minute" and
* "caveat emptor" and
* "If I can trick you into giving me your money, that's your fault"
Regulation helps discourage that.
In this case, "REG-U-LATION" actually "caused" the issue. Up-to-date LIDAR of every home in America was deemed to be invasive breach of privacy so was regulated out. This product didn't successfully account for future non-technical issues.
I "foolishly" tried to reward a previously known-good vendor by buying a product from the company that had sold me a vacuum that worked for ten years... which brings up the next truism:
* "Past performance is not an indicator of future success"
Sorry, it's not. Latest example, Canon's phone app for its cameras, for GPS tagging, remote shutter, transfer to phone, didn't require any Internet access, but now they changed it to require an online login for no reason. Oh and that login only works with chrome installed.
So miss me with this caveat emptor libertarian fantasy land ("openly lies about its specs" is the buyer's fault?!)
> They buy stuff that openly lies about its specs
That one is very specifically failure or regulators and absolutely should subject to regulation. We can bicker about whether repairability should be regulated ... but false claims by the manufacturers absolutely should.
It is absurd to blame the user for this one.
You may want to check if your robot is supported by Valetudo: https://valetudo.cloud/
Reading through that site, it seems like instead of locking yourself into a corporations app, you're locking it into his instead. He doesn't seem to want to run an open source community, he's building an app for himself and publishing it for people who have exactly the same use case as him.
True, but you don't need to install updates once you have the software installed, and it's probably better not to. The software on the robot doesn't need the app to control, either - it exposes an API that either the app or custom software can talk to, sans cloud servers.
ooo thanks for the link, buuut it appears NEATO Robotics vacuums aren't supported ... yet.
I had hoped Home Assistant might be able to handle it but it appears their integration just sends the data to NEATO, which no no longer works.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/neato/
Blarg.
Nobody on HN wants to hear this, but REG-U-LA-TION. The glorious free market is consistently failing to solve the growing problem of cloud-tethered and app-tethered products being nerfed by their manufacturers after the point of sale.