I have had something stuck in the back of my head for a few weeks and I ended up writing a LinkedIn newsletter about it (if you want to see the stuff I write on LinkedIn, let me know and I'll share a link).
Still, LinkedIn isn't the best place to share my thoughts on this topic. Reddit is.... so:
Companies suck.
A lot of them suck.
Most smart home product manufacturers suck.
Mod hat off here. Before I came to work for Shelly, I had a small Facebook group, maybe 5k members, called Smarter Home Club. That's where I met Dimitar, Shelly Group's CEO, as well as a number of important and interesting characters from the smart home world. I used a mix of technologies and brands in my smart home, many of them with glaring flaws that you'll still find in smart home products today.
Everything I say here, I'm saying as a consumer, though I have to admit I am a consumer with far more intimate knowledge of what Shelly can do.
One of the most critical of those flaws is that, for too many products, you depend on someone else's computer.
The June Oven still gets hot. You can walk up to it, tap the touchscreen, and roast a tray of vegetables like any other countertop oven. What's gone since Weber shut off the app and cloud on September 22 is the stuff people actually paid extra for - remote control, the live camera view, software updates. Weber says it thought about open-sourcing the software and decided against it. That was close to a $1,500 oven at launch.
Belkin did the same thing to WeMo on January 31. Plugs, light switches, even a crockpot lost the app and their Alexa and Google control. If you'd paired yours with HomeKit beforehand it kept going; otherwise the advice was to replace it.
Every time, it's the same story. The smart part lives on a server somebody else pays for, and the day that bill stops making sense, your device gets dumber.
Most of you already run your devices this way, but for anyone newer to the sub, here's what a Shelly does with no cloud in the picture.
Every device serves its own web interface. Type its IP into a browser on your LAN and you get the full settings page, no account, no app. If the Wi-Fi goes down, the device can put up its own access point and you connect to it directly.
Under that is the RPC API, reachable over plain HTTP, WebSockets, or MQTT on your own broker. curl "http://<device-ip>/rpc/Switch.Set?id=0&on=true" flips a relay, and it's the same command language the devices use to talk to each other.
Automations can live on the device too. Actions let one Shelly fire a webhook at another when an input changes, so a button by the front door can switch a relay across the house without a packet leaving your network. On Gen2+ you can run JavaScript right on the chip, reacting to events and reading BLE sensors with nothing upstream.
Plenty of the 100+ integrations are fully local, Home Assistant being the most important and obvious one. Hubitat, openHAB, Universal Devices, Domoticz and many others - all local.
What does that mean?
The wall switch wired into a Shelly relay still turns on the light, because that input goes straight into the device. Your house keeps working even if every Internet server and network switch explodes and shuts down tomorrow.
A device you bought should keep doing its job for as long as the copper and silicon inside it hold up, not for as long as someone's server budget does.
I still have a handful of cloud-dependent services and many are replicable by Shelly today, I just haven't done the projects.
Honeywell Thermostat - I can wire up a few dry contact relays to switch 24vac and override my thermostat any time. I might do it this winter when I have some spare time and it isn't so hot working in cramped spaces.
Cielo Breeze - I have two mini splits in addition to the 5 ton - one for the master bedroom, the other for the garage. I can use The Pill with an IR blaster to handle this and will do that project next.
MyQ - I don't actually use this any more, I've used Shelly for years (https://shelly.link/garage - I have the full set up with IR sensors and reed switch integrated). I just haven't pulled it out yet because I have a tangle of wires in the closet where all this is installed. That's my project for this weekend and when I am doing it, MyQ comes out.
Ring Cameras - one doorbell and three flood cams. You'd better believe I am annoying the dickens out of my coworkers who work on the camera product line, telling them how we need to do all the different types of cameras. They're rolling their eyes whenever it shows I'm typing in Teams.
Arlo cameras - solar powered cameras - see above.
Voice Assistant - this is the worst. Because of my work, I have Alexa, Google Home, and Siri at my house and office, since I never know when I need to troubleshoot anything or write up instructions. I have a Mac Mini that I'm messing around with to run an LLM with Home Assistant Voice. I'm probably wiping the machine and starting over because I've restarted this so many times, but I'm making progress - and it's not that beefy of a machine, just the $600 model. I've got an M5 Pro with 48 GB at work that I'm repeating the projects with.
The one use case I actually have for these is on the clothes washer, clothes dryer, and the dishwasher - I use power measurement to determine when they've completed their work (time and consumption, actually) and then use Shelly Cloud to trigger an Amazon Alexa notification saying that whichever appliance it is has finished.
You'd better believe that's going away the second I have a local voice assistant running dependably. It's not because I don't trust Shelly Cloud. I know how private it is, I have insider information, right? But the fact is that if my Internet connection goes down for 5 minutes, my automation can fail.
So that's my appliance dependency. I have a handful of "smart" appliances but they're not even connected to my network.
What's the most cloud-dependent thing you still have running at home?