Development quote of the week

My doorbell can call my phone (via SIP) and I can let people in by pushing a button on the phone.

You might want to check who's at the door before deciding to open it. You might not be able to do that by walking up to the door and looking through the physical peephole, because it's the outer door on a block of flats and it would take you far too long to walk there, or because you have a disability that makes it hard to reach the door, or because you have an enormous house or are very lazy, etc. Connecting the doorbell and (optionally) the lock to a phone app means you can see who's there, talk to them, and let them in, without having to get up.

Connecting it to the cloud means you can do the same even if you're not at home - maybe you want to let a neighbour in to water your plants (without the hassle and risk of giving them a physical key beforehand), or a plumber to fix an emergency, or a delivery driver to leave a parcel in a safe place. Or while at home, if you find phones awkward you can use the various cloud service integrations to connect the display to your TV and control it through a voice assistant, improving accessibility.

One consequence is that any internet-connected device needs a way for the vendor to push firmware updates, so they can respond quickly to reported security vulnerabilities. Obviously you should get one that's competently designed by people who care about security, and that e.g. uses secure boot with signed firmware updates instead of an editcgi.cgi, so that even users with physical access can't write arbitrary files onto it and can't install a persistent exploit to spy on future users. Unfortunately it's hard as a customer to distinguish the few decently-designed ones from the many terrible ones.