Why can't we have the Internet of Nice Things? A home automation primer: 
Off-the-shelf, consumer home automation has fallen into a pretty standard pattern. You have a smart device (like a lightbulb or door lock) that talks to some kind of hub that you put on your network. It communicates with a cloud service owned by the device vendor, and you interface with that service via a mobile app. This provides an easy out-of-the-box experience and lets the vendor iterate on its service both in the cloud and on mobile; however, this model has a lot of weaknesses and is extremely limiting with what it can do.
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