There is a somewhat strangely named German brand that sells private IoT door / security cams. Forgot the name, sadly. They’re quite expensive though. My guess is they might sell private lightbulbs.
For home audio, Sonos is great. Their voice assistant is completely locally processed.
Are you joking about Sonos? They force you to have account with them to use speakers and you have to enable location sharing on your app to connect (!!). They know more about people than their parents do.
> Are you joking about Sonos? They force you to have account with them to use speakers and you have to enable location sharing on your app to connect
Tangential PSA: Red Sea (aquatics) does/did this too. I can't control the lights on my fucking aquarium without all four of them being connected to the internet over wifi and managed through an account registered with an app with location sharing enabled. Only the iOS app worked; the Android version was completely broken.
The app lets you group lights and model the lighting curves however you want but there's no reason this couldn't have been done over Zigbee. I assume my LAN is now part of some Mossad botnet.
Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers, as we all arbitrarily doing things like blocking streaming of audio from your phone.
Sonos might have been good in the past when they were selling a way of streaming your ripped mp3s around your house, they are no longer good now that they think they own the content too.
> Sonos are also agressively pushing out app updates that sunset older models of their speakers
Sonos has a ~10 year support timeline on their speakers. That's longer than even Apple supports any of their devices, and they're often considered the gold standard of long support of tech products.
I hate being made to defend Sonos twice as it makes me feel like a shill, but it is truly how it is.
Sonos doesn’t have tracking. That’s my entire point. And it’s extremely ironic you call Bose “no strings attached”, that’s what Sonos is about in the most literal sense.
You pay a huge premium in trade for less wires, great multi-room audio, decent sound and a long support timeline.
I will say that I hope Sonos and Google bury the axe at some point, and the Cast (or at least DIAL) protocol gets added.
On the planet I live on, Sonos does obnoxious tracking. There is no direct communication between client and speaker at all - everything calls/is routed via home. Moreover client on mobile requires and will refuse to run setup until you grant it precise location permissions. It's a spaghetti of strings attached.
Bose and other bluetooth speakers don't have any strings attached because:
* you don't have to be connected to the internet to use it
* you don't have to have account with them to use it
* you don't have to grant tracking permissions to use it
* manufacturer can decide to discontinue product or go bankrupt - it doesn't matter, you can still use product as you did before, you're unaffected
* you don't have to worry about software deprecation - new versions of sonos client for iOS require recent versions of Apple devices - you can't install client on older phones/tablets to use your speaker
And yet they're one of the few (only?) smart speaker that does locally processed commands. You and everyone else downvoting me are unknowledgeable clowns.
You might be thinking of the Homematic IP line, great products for home automation, they also have door locks etc. They are also compatible with just Homematic which doesn't use the internet (so no IoT), but rather a local gateway for controlling the devices. I don't think they have lightbulbs though. The company name is eQ-3
Homematic has a pretty good reputation. Their stuff is reliable and they're quite open to DIYers. In turn the products are a bit on the expensive side, but not wildly so.
https://smart-life24.de/ perhaps? They do sell light bulbs. They're not particularly expensive. I think you might need an account with the Smart Life app, and my girlfriend appears to have a proper account using her e-mail address, but my user ID appears to be a random string, so I guess that's somewhat private?!
Word of warning about Netatmo cameras - even if you buy the HomeKit Secure Video ones, they stop working if the memory card dies. And it dies a LOT on their cameras. I've got 3 of their outdoor security cameras, and two of them stopped working while I was away on holiday. I had a very long conversation with them about this massive flaw in their system, they kept just saying "it needs the memory card to save the video" - I pointed out that a) it doesn't, it's streaming to HSV, and b) with every other camera I own the memory card is optional. The quality of the video on them is also considerably worse than any of my other cameras.
Good to know! I have been using Logitech circle view with HomeKit secure video with no problems other than needing to make sure wifi strength is plentiful.
Ideally, there would be a wired HomeKit secure video option, but I have yet to see it.
I have a Logitech cam too and it's been trouble free with a great picture, though for some reason it does seem to take longer to start streaming on my iPhone than the other cameras. I was really hoping for some big improvements in Home / HomeKit with iOS 17 but alas, no.
True, I have a wired Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub but it does seem to just change on a whim from time to time - there's about 15 candidate hubs in the house!
> Apple TV which I try to ensure is always my primary HomeHub
How?
I was under the impression that you cannot actively decide which device becomes the primary one?
I 'only' got a wired ATV and a HomePod mini - and the mini is the primary hub way more often that i'd like it to be (like... none of the time, at all :) )
It's a royal pain in the arse, but it involves unplugging every candidate hub and plugging them back in again in the preferred order. Can't say for sure, but I think the points where my preferred order has changed without me doing anything were down to very short power cuts during the night, when that happens, you get whichever device boots back up first as your primary hub.
Depends on how DIY you want to go - i got a Dahua VTO-something doorbell that is powered by PoE that in turn is bridged into HomeKit/HKSV via Scrypted - works pretty darn well :)
Scrypted supports quite a few cameras, doorbells etc...
For home audio, Sonos is great. Their voice assistant is completely locally processed.