Specific example: When on dating apps you see "green bubbles" as a red flag/un-dateable trait, it has done considerable harm.

The people who try to use their webcam mic or the built in mic are the ones causing most of the problem (yes I'm also looking at you Macbook users).

I always thought it'd be a great idea if in your internal Teams or Zoom instance you had a "send this person a new headset" button to fix the problem.

The best teams I've ever worked on as a product manager/owner is where we have shared context. These problems described here are minimal. In those teams I could provide technical input to engineers, and engineers gave me "consumer facing" suggestions on features.

I've believed for a long time that lack of business/use context drives a lot of these issues.

Take for instance I currently work at an IoT company, and if I'm working with engineers who have no idea what a thermostat does/how it works other than "makes it hotter or colder" then we have much more difficulty building shared understanding of a feature request.

I also know this because 10 years ago that was my simple understanding of a thermostat... so it was much harder for me to understand why we were doing certain things.

Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.

This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.

I DO believe people are calling the police less for crime, even violent crime.

However, how do you have an official source of "I decided not to call the cops".

Apple, by overlaying iMessage features over SMS and only accessible to iPhone users have created a virtual second class of phone users.

> Not at all. A few of my friends are techies and they use Android/iPhone about 50/50. Family is mixed as well. No one in family uses iMessage.

I would bet money this is the opposite of the majority experience.

All the know is "android makes the bubbles green and iMessage doesn't work as well with them, or at all".

My "normal" friends and family are majority iPhone users. I'm Android.

I "literally ruin" their group texts. I've seen people actually reject relationships because they don't date people with "green bubbles".

Don't even get me started about work group texts.

I know restaurants where some of the servers have group iMessage chats with customers for early notification about nightly specials, Android users literally can't be added.

Likely not maliciously, but this has created almost a "second/lower class" of phone users that encompasses ~50% of the country.

Yet we've gone through many iterations of the interview process (and testing, things like leetcode) to avoid having to basically accept a gut check of "do I think this person will perform well".

It's more of an art versus science than I think people give it credit for.

So is interviewing itself.

By definition, they are using MORE platform/API traffic than the average user and not paying more.

The only thing I can think of is someone outside of the "knowledge chain" caught wind of it and just fired of the legal threat.

For instance, if I told some people inside my company how much traffic HA uses in terms of how many users are on it they'd probably freak out like this too.

But their reason (cost and traffic) is the biggest reason we don't like it either.

Which is why to this point, I let it go and don't actually tell anyone how much traffic it takes up. It isn't worth fighting over. Haha.

> Power users are some of the best cheap marketing available to device manufacturers. They will post about your product online. They will tell their friends. They will make your product better for no charge to you.

If I had some way to quantify that, I'd accept it. But as it sits now the vast majority of our users don't interact with any integration models short of "share data with my installer". Alexa being the most popular aside from that.

> I'd love to hear about how this could be considered a cybersecurity issue. It's typically far more secure than a cloud connected solution, but most companies don't like that line of reasoning because it doesn't allow them to track their users.

Go look at major IoT "security problem" news. It is either "cloud leaked data" or "OEM didn't lock down local interface correctly". See the recent Bosch Thermostat story.

Or the "horror years" of Chinese ODM cameras showing up on shodan with live feed video access.

If 3k home assistant users take up as much traffic as say... 50% of my total population we're just supposed to accept that cost in perpetuity?

> Or, crazy idea, just let users use their devices locally. You won't even have to get your shit together and fix your api then

I advocate for local access internally (to be clear, I don't work for Haier). But I'm here to discuss things I have sphere of influence over as well.

> Now also just design an official home assistant module and you've turned this drama into community goodwill.

That, again, costs money/people/time that can be spent doing things that keep us all getting paid.

All this said, we have lots of API keys in our systems issued that are used in HA, and they DO take up lots of traffic. I sort of let it go because of exactly this (it creates a lot of noise to shut it off for little benefit).

Again, I also agree we should all offer local interfaces, but that's an uphill cybersecurity battle (lots of reasons, some of them not great)