Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can’t access your stuff. But that’s just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it’s getting worse.
It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage “cloud” “integration” involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you.
If you ever saw the South Park episode where they try to get the cable company to do something on their behalf and the cable company people just touch themselves inappropriately upon hearing the lamentations of their customers, well, I suspect that’s what’s going on here. The management of these places are fundamentally sadists, and they are going to auger all of these things into the ground to make their short-term money before flying the coop for the next big thing they can destroy.
That sounds like it’s just trading vendor lock-in with Phillips for Apple instead.
Nothing wrong with that, right? As Bob Dylan says, everyone serves someone.
if OP doesn’t have the passion or time for DIY, the reality is an ecosystem awaits.
Sometimes you just want to pop a QR code, screw your light in and then have your smart speaker / phone just so it’s thing.
the key is who will offer what OP needs without farming data for resale, or, worse, criminal enterprise.