Blackbird Watch logo Blackbird Watch A lot of smart home devices are dumb

A lot of smart home devices are dumb

Back home, we have a regular wall air-conditioner. My bedroom has 2 remotes for it: one by the door and one at the nightstand, so no matter where I am, the AC is easy to control. That “dumb” remote does a lot: it schedules, and it even nags me when the filter needs cleaning.

To be honest, I never really thought of scheduling and filter notifications as “smart” features. They’re just features that every sane AC should preferably have.

My first apartment in college had no central cooling, so the first thing I did was order a window AC unit from Best Buy. I didn’t look too much into it; I saw it came with the unit and one remote, figured it’d have the schedule and filter notifications, and just bought it.

Turns out it was an extremely “dumb” device without the “smart” app. Without the app, all the remote could do was turn the AC on, change the temperature, and turn it off. Scheduling, electricity usage, dust filter status, all of that lived behind their shitty app. I get the electricity usage thingy needing an app, but why would I want an app to do something the remote should already do?

So I set up the app. It was flawless … for exactly one day. The next day it randomly disconnected, and it kept doing that every day for the next 5 or so, until I just gave up on it.

Great, no AC scheduling for me.

And I think I know why it’s like this. A remote gives the company nothing. An app gives them my data, an account, my email, and a reason to annoy me with notifications I didn’t ask for. The AC was never really the product. I am. And the part that gets me is that I already paid for the hardware, full price, and somehow I’m still the thing being sold. The rest is just the word “smart” selling units: slap WiFi on the box, tick the marketing checkbox, and nobody cares if any of it actually makes my life easier.

You’ve seen the exact same move on the web. Reddit is a website and it works perfectly fine in a browser. But they do everything in their power to shove you into their app: blurring the page, popping up “open in app” banners, making the mobile site just annoying enough to give up. Not because the app is better for me, but because an app can track me in ways a browser tab could never dream of.

Here’s what I want from my home devices:

I’m not anti-app (okay, maybe I am, a bit). An electricity usage monitor living only in the app is perfectly fine, and so are actual “smart” features, like turning the AC on when I’m heading home in the summer, or shutting it off when I leave. But my “smart” AC doesn’t even have those. It just took the basics and locked them behind a login.

I love technology. Be it work or play, I’m always thinking about it, and it’ll probably (hopefully) keep me from being homeless for the next many years. But if there’s one thing that scares and annoys me, it’s these so-called “smart” home devices. They work until they don’t, and when they don’t, I have no idea how to fix them.