A perk of connected devices, or at least what gadget manufacturers will tell you, is they can receive over-the-air updates to keep your device current. Those updates don’t always go as planned, however. In fact, they can go horribly wrong. Take a company called Lockstate, for example, which attempted to issue new software to its LS6i smart locks last week and ended up bricking devices. That isn’t great.
I don’t know what these people were expecting.
This is wifi based lock- any f***tard can start guessing pin codes on your lock and after 5 failed attempts your lock is blocked- wow… I smell agile quality assurance here- let’s our clients test our s***code out first!
They were expecting working locks.
Any engineer could tell you, if it sounds too good to be true, it is. But just try to convince your supervisor of that… all he sees is savings being passed on (to his year-end bonus).
Really? Why though?
I’d suppose those people have *some* other “smart” device (and be it a smart phone). Did they never experience troubles with them? I find that extremely unlikely.
Even die-hard Apple fans mention problems, usually saying something like “Well, still better than X” or “It all went downhill since Jobs died”.
I really don’t think anyone buying a smart device and thinking it will just work is right in their mind. At least not after the first time.
There are good ways to deal with software updates and bad ways to deal with software updates. A good pattern is to have redundant storage, so that you can go back to the previous version if something goes wrong. This works for BIOS upgrades, firmware upgrades, whole operating systems (like ChromeOS or CoreOS), and IoT devices. It’s a solved problem for many years now and it infuriates me to no end that some companies choose not to use this pattern and then things like this happen.
Anyone using wifi-capable locks is asking for it if you ask me. “Smart”-locks are a solution looking for a problem anyways.
The problem it solves is all the people who ones 10s or 100s of homes. And are involved the “sharing” economy of “sharing” their “own” “personal” homes over airbnb.
And depending on city, what they are doing is probably also illegal.
But that is the use-case of smartlocks