And this is why all of my "smart" home devices are managed through Home Assistant without Internet access. I simply won't buy a device that can't be used that way. I shouldn't have to create an "account" or provide a name and email address to use a device that I physically own. A good way to start is to look for Zigbee devices; the protocol is local only by design and the Zigbee coordinator/router can be a simple USB dongle connected to an ordinary PC.
So much this, considering the wave of shitty cloud subscription based smart home products (half of which have already been bricked by their backing companies going out of business), Home Assistant sounds like something that's too good to be true.
It also demonstrates to a wide, non-technical audience that home networking, and eschewing cloud services is not difficult at all. I have strong hopes for a local-first future.
In fact, I hope, considering how much the EU has been pushing digital sovereignity, I'd love if they introduced some legislation that mandated that any product that could be concievably made to work without a cloud, should be forced to do so.
Half of the home automation crap they are selling phones home to some central server (Tuya I'm looking at you mainly), and there are lot of products like my AC which also only work with a cloud integration which I'm not super comfortable with.
Sadly the vast majority of consumers are not going to care, or worse, they could think that the local option is inferior. Most people don't run their own automation. A lot of people don't even set up their own WiFi. Mainstream products, as expected, aim for the least amount of required knowledge.
Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/
That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
I have a Xiaomi one, and that also connects to the cloud if you wanna use the smartphone app, but you can just not connect it to the internet, set it down, push the button and it does its thing
Honestly, the dumber the better. The old 0 smarts Vileda VR102 still outperforms most of the expensive sensor laden connected units I've encoutered. Sadly no longer available (except online at 4x their original cost).
