Control Your Home With Your Phone

When will manufacturers learn that we like our phones for distracting us from bullshit, not “controlling” the bullshit? Whether it’s The Neato Botvac (above) or the Roomba 980, the simple task of cleaning the floor gets abstracted into a thousand-dollar nightmare. The Philips Hue system allows you to control your house’s lights with your phone, if you’re willing to spend hundreds (or thousands) of dollars and wind up scrubbing your finger on a phone app for twice as long as it would take you to walk across a room and flip a switch. And the Koubachi is a $150+ gadget that tells you when to water a single houseplant, in case the concept of “pour a little water on your plant every day” seems too complex not to replace with a phone app and a piece of plastic.