But then I need to be able to open a connection from my phone to the device. With NATs, Dynamic IPs, ISP configured firewalls/routers and so on, this is decidedly non-trivial. Sure, you and I are smart enough to hack something together that will probably work, but end users aren't.
>> But then I need to be able to open a connection from my phone to the device. With NATs, Dynamic IPs, ISP configured firewalls/routers and so on, this is decidedly non-trivial.
There's always a "but". ISPs need more regulation. They need to be carriers of bits, and they should be forced to hand out fixed IP addresses (IPV6 makes this trivial) or even blocks /8 to homes. In the meantime there is dynamic DNS. It seems like a better idea to fix the problems standing in the way than to run every IoT device through remote servers. If you do that, you're making a choice and it's not in the customers best interest.
I for one will never participate in IoT that works the way these things do today. My furnace needs to fucking work all the time. Having a fancy NEST fail without a network connection is not an option. A simple mercury switch is more reliable and doesn't collect information about me.
But then I need to be able to open a connection from my phone to the device. With NATs, Dynamic IPs, ISP configured firewalls/routers and so on, this is decidedly non-trivial. Sure, you and I are smart enough to hack something together that will probably work, but end users aren't.