Just confirms my experience that whenever “there is an app” for a device, it is a red flag as the device’s ecosystem is fragile: when the vendor looses interest in maintaining app or servers, your device turns into a brick. Plus, those apps demand suspicious permissions like access to the address book or the ability to make phone calls.
I absolutely hate when networking equipment forces you to use an app to set it up, and the app doesn’t do anything that a website couldn’t do.
I encountered this with some solar equipment from Enphase (IQ Gateway, which all the inverters connect to). The installer had to set it up using wifi and an “installer app” before I could connect it via Ethernet cable or access the (local!) web UI.
On the flip side, I have to give Enphase a shout out for having a fully-featured local web API running on the device itself. I’ve had Home Assistant polling it every second for years (to pull data about solar generation per panel, total power consumption, grid import/export, etc) and haven’t had issues. With so much stuff being cloud-reliant, it was a good surprise.
I absolutely hate when networking equipment forces you to use an app to set it up, and the app doesn’t do anything that a website couldn’t do.
but the website wouldnt demand 87 permissions and have the ability to silently upload all your contacts and god knows what else to a secret server for advertisement and identification/tracking purposes.
Which is why every company uses apps… even if those apps are just a website wrapped in a app container. because you are the product. not the device you are using.
Lol I have almost the same experience. I tried Eero. Never mind that it had literally only one LAN port. You also had to do everything on a mobile app, without any options to modify stuff under the hood. It was also detecting phantom devices and dropping my actual devices from wifi. When I contacted support, I discovered during troubleshooting they had live visibility of my network. I switched to a basic, traditional Netgear router after that, and now I’m using a GL.Inet (openwrt) router as well.
Just confirms my experience that whenever “there is an app” for a device, it is a red flag as the device’s ecosystem is fragile: when the vendor looses interest in maintaining app or servers, your device turns into a brick. Plus, those apps demand suspicious permissions like access to the address book or the ability to make phone calls.
I absolutely hate when networking equipment forces you to use an app to set it up, and the app doesn’t do anything that a website couldn’t do.
I encountered this with some solar equipment from Enphase (IQ Gateway, which all the inverters connect to). The installer had to set it up using wifi and an “installer app” before I could connect it via Ethernet cable or access the (local!) web UI.
On the flip side, I have to give Enphase a shout out for having a fully-featured local web API running on the device itself. I’ve had Home Assistant polling it every second for years (to pull data about solar generation per panel, total power consumption, grid import/export, etc) and haven’t had issues. With so much stuff being cloud-reliant, it was a good surprise.
but the website wouldnt demand 87 permissions and have the ability to silently upload all your contacts and god knows what else to a secret server for advertisement and identification/tracking purposes.
Which is why every company uses apps… even if those apps are just a website wrapped in a app container. because you are the product. not the device you are using.
Depends on what the app does. If required I don’t want it, if it’s optional features I would never even touch then ehh whatever.
My oven has an app, don’t care what it does and will never use it.
Until they push a software update to your device to force using the app for basic features…
How do they push out an update to something that I will never connect to?
It’s basically what the Eero line of routers does, you can’t configure it without the app, and there’s no web UI.
I’m still more confident in Eero than Motorola to not fuck it up, yet I returned that shit back and bought a GL.iNet instead.
My fiber install last year came with a “free” eero router, I sent it back.
My fiber install this year came with one, this time I refused to let them install it.
Lol I have almost the same experience. I tried Eero. Never mind that it had literally only one LAN port. You also had to do everything on a mobile app, without any options to modify stuff under the hood. It was also detecting phantom devices and dropping my actual devices from wifi. When I contacted support, I discovered during troubleshooting they had live visibility of my network. I switched to a basic, traditional Netgear router after that, and now I’m using a GL.Inet (openwrt) router as well.
Even worse is that you can’t even split the 2.4GHz and 5GHz into different SSIDs.
Surely easier for the average person, but it sucks if you have some stubborn devices that tend to prefer 2.4GHz over 5GHz for no good reason.