[reefab]

From the article's footnotes:

> While on the subject of smartphone driven hardware, experience has shown me that software has a much shorter mean-time-to-obsolescence than hardware. Any gizmo that needs an app to make it work will have the service life of a bluebottle, as Apple’s planned obsolescence orphans the app with an iOS upgrade.

This has been my experience too and I wish manufacturers would remove the requirement on having an app to use/configure the device.

Because of that, I try to make sure that such devices I design provides a basic web interface that makes it possible to setup and use the device.

This is impossible or at least difficult if the device is powered by a 8-bit MCU but with the dropping prices of beefier MCU and linux-compatible SoC this shouldn't be an issue in the future.

Of course, there is also the issue of remote services that those devices often depends on, even if it's not exactly necessary sometimes.