These 5 smart devices taught me that cloud dependency isn't worth the convenience

Published Aug 10, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT Samir Makwana is a technology journalist and editor from India since past 18 years and his work appears on MakeUseOf, HowToGeek, GSMArena, BGR, GuidingTech, The Inquisitr, TechInAsia, TechWiser, and others. He has written news, features, and gadget reviews for national technology media publications. His passion is to help people with their technology problems and gadget purchases. For that, he has worked for some of the biggest international technology publications, covering news, explainers, how-to guides, listicles, and product-buying guides. He has worked as an editor and managed teams since 2015. His expertise broadly covers computers, smartphones, game consoles, headphones, smart home products, browsers, and apps. I started building my smart home with a single goal in mind: to make my life easier. Before long, my drawer was full of smart devices, and my phone was full of different apps. I even subscribed to some of the smart features and kept a couple of smart hubs on my desk. I’ve been through the process of buying, testing, and setting up devices in my smart home for the past several months. One pattern kept showing up. The devices that felt smart when I bought them added the most friction during setup and afterward. Later, I moved to a local-first smart home platform with Home Assistant. That’s when I ditched some smart devices and never looked back. My smart speakers It turned into a glorified timer I assumed a smart home was built around smart speakers, and that’s how I ended up with two of them: Amazon Echo Plus and Apple HomePod. I did enjoy interacting with them via voice commands to check the weather, play music, or run quizzes. And that’s where the problem was. Voice control only worked with specific phrasing, which felt robotic. ​ Most of the automations were simply setting triggers for actions to occur at specific times, or just me talking to the microphone. Those smart speakers were always listening, and I didn’t like the idea of every conversation or question being logged on a company’s server. Getting rid of Echo Plus and HomePod didn’t mean giving up on voice control entirely. I built my own voice-controlled assistant using a local LLM running on a Home Assistant-powered home server acting as a smart hub. So the voice commands stay on my network instead of someone else’s. Daily stuff like lights and AC runs on motion-based routines that don’t need a command at all. I use voice control only for routines where a switch doesn’t fit, like calling out “good night” from the bed. Anything that’s left over is one tap away from the dashboard. A proprietary hub for smart lights One more box working with one more app Like many folks, I started automations with lighting. My first subjects were Philips Hue smart bulbs that taught me the hard way that I’d need a proprietary hub to work with them. Before buying a Hue hub outright, I briefly borrowed a friend’s hub. And I found it wouldn’t work with smart bulbs from other brands, leaving me with two sets of apps for automation and no way to trigger one from the other. Switching from a bridge to a USB-based Zigbee coordinator dongle plugged into my home server solved the problem. The Zigbee dongle works with a wide range of bulb brands. The scenes and effects otherwise tied to Hue's app are just automations I edit myself. Though the process lacks polish, I get to own and tweak my smart light setup. Smart plug locked to an app No need for a separate app for each plug Smart plugs are cheap and the easiest way to add smarts to a regular gadget. To find the best option, I ended up with four different smart plug brands. That required me to use four different apps, each with its own login, to turn the smart plugs on or off. I opened the wrong app more than once to control a smart plug. After a while, I gave up on it entirely. Thankfully, most of the smart plugs, even the cheapest ones, turned out to be flashable with ESPHome firmware. Of course, I had to jump through hoops to do that, but bringing them all into one dashboard was totally worth it. That meant I no longer had to remember which app worked for which plug. I got rid of the apps and now control them through a single interface. A cloud-tied robot vacuum Does it need the internet to clean a room Ever since a robot vacuum arrived, I checked off one big daily chore. That convenience quickly turned into a nagging annoyance. The Wi-Fi-enabled robot vacuum wouldn’t start the cleaning routines before checking the manufacturer’s servers. That often translated to delays when there was a service outage or my home internet went down. What really bugged me was that my home’s floor plan was mapped and sitting on a third party’s server. Owing to the community-developed integration, access to select features of a robot vacuum is still locked behind proprietary APIs. For example, the integration for Ecovacs robot vacuums doesn’t offer a camera feed. I use the Home Assistant integration for simpler automations rather than opening the app to handle complex information. The only time I open the app is to check the robot vacuum's exact location. Until all features get unlocked for local access, I’m fine with this arrangement. The subscription-based video doorbell Paying monthly to see who’s there The video doorbell itself was never the issue. The problem was discovering that I needed to pay a recurring fee for clip storage, smart alerts, and even basic person detection. It felt odd to pay monthly to review footage from the video doorbell that I bolted outside my home. Those “smart alerts” were mostly for squirrels and birds. Instead, I moved recording to a local setup running Frigate on a mini PC. The footage stays inside my network instead of routing through someone else’s cloud first. Frigate also handles local detection without having me upload footage. Reducing the friction with fewer smart devices Looking back, none of these smart devices were a bad purchase. Each one came with a dependency I didn’t need: a cloud account, a subscription, or an app that kept phoning home. Removing that handed me back local control, and it’s the one thing worth checking before buying the next device. Does it need a manufacturer’s server to work? Are basic features locked behind a subscription? Not every purchase needs that test, but knowing the answer beats ditching the device later. Building a fully offline smart home isn’t the only way. There are a few devices worth keeping connected. That convenience of plug-and-play smart devices does count for something. I made the mistake of trading reliability for features I barely used. But once I discovered alternative ways to use them on my own network, going back never made sense.