You need the cloud for vendor lock in and spying.<p>That being said, most users can’t set up home assistant. But the reason for that is that HA lacks the funding to do the insane amount of work required to offer a near zero touch setup process, and other vendors have no incentive to play ball with them much either. (Computers are very hard to use and making them easy is a giant tar pit of grueling work.)<p>Going full circle, this is because the lock in and double dipping via surveillance is what subsidizes all these other products so they have the funding to make themselves this polished.<p>This is why ad and spyware encrusted smart TVs are so cheap, sometimes even sold as loss leaders.<p>It’s very hard for privacy respecting user empowering products to compete with the gigantic subsidy you get from being user hostile and privacy invasive. If consumers actually cared about privacy and companies that are not user hostile <i>and were willing to pay anywhere from 2X to 10X more for these things,</i> this would be different.<p>This economic dynamic is why we can’t have nice things in consumer tech.<p>It’s a variation on a well known economic issue with hidden subsides. Let’s say there are two pizza places. One sells pizza. The other sells pizza and meth under the table with a code word, like <i>Los Pollos Hermanos</i> from <i>Breaking Bad.</i>. Which one dominates the local pizza market? Obviously the one selling meth. They have a hidden subsidy, so they can either undercut everyone else or offer a superior product at the same price point. It’s almost impossible to compete with this.