I agree with almost everything you said, save for the ‘cloud service’. Simply, the only thing any device needs to connect to for me is either my router or my Home Assistant instance. On a related note, I’m tired of being farmed for data, especially when I don’t use advertising or any kind of invasive technique to make purchasing decisions. As for bug fixes thanks to anonymous data, if I see any issues I’ll go to the devs. If it isn’t broken I don’t need a fix.

I can think of many times being connected to external servers have been detrimental. I definitely don’t want any half-baked features/enshittification like AI detection, I just want CCTV (Reolink); I don’t want good features that I use to be removed just because the majority never used Snap, and voice control was great until ‘Xbox’ became ‘Hey Cortana’ then removed (Xbox).

Cloud connection does far more than give users external connectivity and cool stuff like remote control with your phone. It brings unwanted extras. The other issue is I bet there is no way for a consumer to replace the cloud service with their own, personal system (therefore extremely safe from hacks compared to a centralised system).

I don’t need this much assistance.