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If you want a lightbulb that changes colors to be controlled by a phone or network accessible device, as opposed to some other sort of special RF remote, and you DONT want random other people to be able to control or possibly disable or damage your lights, then it kinda needs to have an account.
By all means, avoid iot stuff if it's not your thing, but then why are you looking at color changing lightbulbs? The ones that need special remotes are terrible gimmicks and the ones that get wired into a hardwired home automation system cost a fortune to set up and require a ton of installation.
and you DONT want random other people to be able to control or possibly disable or damage your lights, then it kinda needs to have an account.
You need to have some way to either communicate with the lightbulb over the power lines (e.g. X10) or wirelessly communicate in an authenticated way, true enough, but that's not the same as requiring connectivity to a cloud service.
this can be done locally without access to a third party server though, local administration has been a thing for years
Nobody I know of is stopping you from doing that. Zigbee is pretty ubiquitous, Hue can be controlled offline and by third party bridges and can just link directly into a zigbee controller if you want. Most people don't want to bother setting that up.
Avoid any style of Kasa product, those I know from experience will not let you even initiate setup without logging into a Kasa account, other than that Wyze used to require an account for setup but it's been a few years since I've used them
you dont even need that. You can run TuyaLocal plugin in homeassistant and essentially have a local light server that replaces their cloud.
the cheapest of the cheap lights work great when you disconnect them from shitty clouds
No, it doesn't need an account- wifi encryption is enough. If someone has their color changing light bulbs on unsecured wifi, that's on them.
So there are newer protocols under an IoT standard called "matter" that solve a lot of these problems. You can manage them with a local controller like home assistant. No need to create accounts or ship data out to a public cloud. Private, local device adoption and mgmt. I've been an early adopter and there have been some challenges but it's gotten a lot better recently.
I mean, that's great, I like self hosting and running my own basic household server and the like. But are you seriously suggesting that's anywhere close to being accessible to most people?
Apple Home and Google home are matter controllers. So yes. Direct benefit still for those home users is you can mix and match OEM products (like light bulbs) and not need to have a seperate app/acct/hub/bridge/controller whatever for those products. If you don't want to go the DIY route.
Zigbee has already done that for a long time and most of those smart bulbs could already be used with various bridges or zigbee controllers.
Oh for sure. Actually the thread mesh network that a lot of matter capable devices use is based on zigbee. It's like zigbee mesh + ipv6
Absolutely no reason these things couldn't be synced to an app on your phone/pc and communicate over wifi. You could use a VPN if you wanted to manage them remotely. The manufacturer doesn't need to be involved after they sell you the product.