Why isn't home IoT more widely adopted despite its benefits?

We had a keypad smart lock on our front door for a while, but we got tired of having to reconfigure it and replace its batteries when they occasionally died; now we have an ordinary lock once again.

My wife bought an Alexa speaker for the kid's room, to help with setting alarms and remembering things, playing podcasts at night, and to use as an intercom: but all electronic devices in the kid's room exist in a baffling state of perpetual reorganization, everything with a plug being unplugged, moved around, and maybe or maybe not plugged back in, seemingly every day, for no apparent reason; so the speaker is mostly unusable.

Smart bulbs, I have never really seen the point: turning lights on and off is not difficult enough that any better a solution than the traditional switch would seem to be necessary.

I suppose I spend enough time dealing with tech as it is, and when I am home, I just want things to work. Simpler is better.

I don't think they're popular here in the US, either.

I'm not really sure what those benefits are supposed to be. Your phone has an assistant built in. A smart bulb sounds like a novelty at best. A smart lock just lets you inside the house.

The benefits seem minimal, at non-zero cost. Americans can be pretty cheap.

We can also be pretty profligate, and I suspect that many of those IOT devices that do get sold are mostly ignored. People would buy them purely because they're "the best", and never actually use any of those features.

I'm sure privacy and security figure into it as well, though given how bad we are at privacy in other domains, I don't think it's the major factor. I think it's just a small negative that gets weighed against a positive that's hard to distinguish from zero.

We here in the US don't connect devices to the internet. Everything sits behind a NAT router to "hide" it from the internet. The main reason for this is that we don't have suitable operating systems fit for that purpose. They would have close to reliable as a light switch, something that works for decades without fail, and is easy to replace.

Show me a computer system that can withstand direct exposure to the internet, without maintenance (and without active management), for a year, and I'll be surprised, and reconsider.

So, to get out from behind NAT, an external server is required, which raises all of the security and reliability problems. Plus, someone has to pay to keep those servers up and secure. This requires a subscription fee to be sustainable.

One factor for me is the multitude of (sometimes semi-)isolated vendor ecosystems. The Thread and Matter technologies should eventually improve this, but right now vendor lock-in can be a problem and only the tech-savvy are going to actively seek out and deploy prior vendor-agnostic solutions like zigbee. Home Assistant is a great tool for geeks but a PITA for average Joe/Jolene, I think.

Privacy and security are good reasons, but I think the more common thought is "this is another tech thing that will break in some way I don't understand and cannot get fixed, plus none of it will work with other IoT brands". People encounter enough tech complexity online that they have a gut-level negative reaction to having more of it in the physical world.

I don't like that it creates arbitrary interruptions. Getting sidetracked from my main goal because my light bulbs aren't connecting makes me irrationally angry.

Besides that I don't have to accept any terms and conditions to turn my lights on. I am not tracked by my regular light switches.

The extra complexity adds failure modes that just don't need to exist. I know someone with even a simple system (Lutron + Alexa) and it interferes with the basics (turn on a light) especially for guests. The only feature I really love is the "turn off everything in the house".

I don't know in general, but I don't use "IoT" devices because the risks and data exposure to companies are enormous. The little actual value IoT devices provide aren't even close to enough to make the decision a hard one.

a) What are the benefits? Most of these devices are savings mere seconds of labor

b) What are the costs? Just about every person I know who got into IoT devices has regretted it within a few years (things break, manufacturers go out business, just keeping up with updates can be a pain)

Why even bother?

Adds more complexity and I have security concerns with them.

French people have brains and hands. They also have Jacques Lacan.

IOT for me seems to come from the perpsective that human beings are brainless, stupid and lazy and the thinking is that something technical can replace simple day to day human engagement with the world, stuff like locking and unlocking a door DOH!, turning a light bulb on and off DOH!, turning the radio on DOH!, setting an alarm clock DOH! and speaking to an inanimate object to select your favourite song DOH!.

Having IOT does not make life easier. Just use your hands and brain, thats why you have them.

This account used to document all the reasons to avoid anything calling itself smart or IoT https://xcancel.com/internetofshit