Of course, the ideal would be that nobody buys cloud-connected stuff anymore but that’s just not realistic. Most people have no idea of the risk involved until it bites them and even if they have, they will usually buy the cheapest thing anyway.

I believe that this is a case for regulation. Companies like Amazon, Google, etc. can just disable people’s accounts quoting their internal policies and customers have little to no recourse when something like this happens.

An Apple, Google or Microsoft account isn’t just a private contract between two consenting parties anymore. In order to function in this world, you NEED to have these accounts and they should be recognized as such.

Just like the power or water company can’t just shut you off without good reasons and appeals procedures, we should have the same options here. There should be oversight, an appeals process and independent decision making. Not just a single company and it’s faceless support AIs and internal policy documents.

I was a teenager at the time so I got to play with it when it was new. I had the privilege of learning how to code on my Amiga 500. Sadly it was in AmigaBASIC and later AMOS Pro (I even bought the compiler for that) and I never got to using real programming languages until the Amiga was already defunct. I find myself going back now, though, and admiring the OS interfaces in context with much more knowledge. The UI APIs were very lacking compared to today’s toolkits, but for the time they were really next level.

I’ve had them for longer than the Shelly integration in hass existed so I’m using stock firmware and connect them to my MQTT server to avoid a cloud dependency. I haven’t tried the hass integration or flashing them, this is working fine for me.

The WiFi signal is mostly fine. There are cases where it takes a second or two to update on hass, but that could also be the MQTT server being slow. It doesn’t affect the operation of the lights since the Shelly’s are configured to switch the light themselves and not depend on hass to give them the command, that way the light still work normally if hass is down.

This is anekdotal and just describes my personal experience in the 90s:

I can’t remember quite when I did it, but I upgraded my A500 to KS2.0 back when it was the latest release of the OS somewhere in the 90s. I never found a huge problem with compatibility for games or anything else.

My memory expansion still needed to be disabled for one or two games (by means of a little switch on the side of the case), but for the most part everything seemed to just work.

AmigaOS was far ahead of its time and really a treasure trove of cool features. Not just on the UI side, most of its contemporaries didn’t have loadable and unloadable drivers, pluggable file systems, etc. It’s amazing all this even worked without memory protection, but almost all of it did work.

I have 6 Shelly’s installed like this and it really is a non-issue. If the light isn’t in the state I want, I flip the switch. I have no idea what orientation it’s in and I couldn’t care less. The same applies to my Wife and kids, nobody cares which direction is “on” and which is “off”. It’s pretty obvious if the light is on or off and if you want to change it, just flip it.