Will the app for the smart thermostat be updated three years from now and still be useful? If it was instead a web server app on a routable IP, it wouldn't matter provided they didn't fuck up the authentication and access control.

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, but they're not. That's the modern world. But also even if it was a web server there's usually ways to advertise the IP for the app to connect to. I've seen other stuff do that. So getting an IP is easy. Once the app knows the IP and if you really want to allow connections from outside to your IOT devices (I wouldn't) it could remember the IP and allow that.

You really don't need to give a fixed IP to everything. I think I've given 1 or 2 things fixed IPv6 IPs. Everything else is fine with what it assigns itself.

[–] frezik@midwest.social 2 points 5 months ago

The other app off the top of my head is VoIP. You should be able to "dial" a number directly. Most solutions go through the company's data center first in order to pierce through NAT. Which makes it more expensive, less reliable, slower, and more susceptible to snooping.

There's a "if you build it, they will come" effect here. Once you can address hosts directly, a whole bunch of things become better, and new ideas that were infeasible are now feasible. They don't exist now because they can't.