If it's a "router" and you can't install a OpenWRT on it, then it's an absolute no-brainer to not to buy it.

> And this is why "mandatory app to configure" is a dealbreaker

More and more IP cameras can't be set up without a phone app. TP-Link's Tapo line is really bad about it. Even some Reolink cameras can't be setup on their own.

Now that high quality, affordable brands like Dahua got banned (w/o evidence), there's less pressure on the survivors to not be awful.

I just wish:

- it was more clear when buying a product that an app is required to activate/use/etc a device

- that people who rebelled against this kind of nonsense were backed up by others and respected "more power to you!"

Friend of mine had some (non-Motorola) router that her ISP provided her and the only way to set it up was through an app. The first time I ran into this I couldn't believe it, there was simply no way to set this piece of s*t up without using the app, which (a) didn't work until we'd spent ages faffing around with it and (b) was just a glorified set of different wizards that let you set things up in a few fixed preconfigured ways.

I fear that this will eventually happen to all Amazon Eero products, which has partnerships with telcos in my country for "free" routers.

> On the bright side, maybe someone can get Claude or some other LLM to figure out how to crack it; and perhaps even vibe-code an alternative app.

LLMs are great for this, though the more people use it for blackhat style things, the more I fear they will lockdown LLMs which are useful for reversing things that are legacy as heck and abandonware.

Regular consumers increasingly use apps to do stuff instead of web browsers. They seem to prefer it this way.

And at least for connected devices at home, a dedicated app can have lower friction for initial setup for the "I'm not a computer person" crowd than other alternatives do.

(I know, I know. It's terrible. It even feels something like betrayal sometimes. But that's how it be, anyway -- and you and I are powerless to do anything about it.)

If these apps were entirely local nobody'd care.

The insistence they go through a server is why they suck

I don't know, my first "smart" phone was a Motorola Atrix 4G. You know, that one with (one of) the first fingerprint scanner and that thingy that allowed you to dock it to something like a laptop and thus you'd have a working laptop thingy.

Its wifi/bt card broke exactly one year after I bought it. It worked exactly for 365 days. That was 100% hardware failure and planned obsolescence.

Needless to say never bought not even looked at anything Motorola ever since.

These WiFi products and the associated app aren’t actually from Motorola.

As mentioned in the article, they are products of Premier LogiTech, LLC, who have licensed the Motorola brand name.

There is no singular Motorola. The company has been spinning off different parts of itself for quite a long time.

In 2011/2012, it was divided into different parts. The biggest were Motorola Solutions (mostly focused 2-way radios and related communications infrastructure; stuff commonly used by public safety entities) and Motorola Mobility (mostly cell phones and related stuff).

Google bought Motorola Mobility. It has been said that this was because Google wanted their patent portfolio. In 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo: The same Lenovo that makes ThinkPads is also who makes Motorola phones today.

Somewhere along the line, their name also got licensed out for home networking bits. That appears to be the products that the Mashable article writes about. This history is murkier, but it appears that some combination of Premier LogiTech and Boundless Devices (whoever tf these companies are) is responsible for making the Motorola-branded routers in question.

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tl;dr, the Motorola that makes the radios that cops carry on their hip, the Motorola that makes Android phones that consumers carry in their pocket, and the Motorola that makes home routers are not the same company. Like -- at all.

Conflating them is easy because it is, frankly, a confusing mess.

But still: The shitty software on a Motorola phone is not cut from the same cloth as the shitty software on a Motorola router. They're products of very different companies that share nothing but a common trademark.

You'd be surprised, at work we recently had a contractor install a new office network (growing startup upgrading from the home grade units we had before), they recommended HP Aruba Instant On, and the guy did all the setup on his phone with their app.

Now that it's my network to manage, I have to say that while it's a huge upgrade from the TP-Link Deco units we had before, the cloud management just makes it worse. The web UI is slow, probably because every click requires a round trip from my laptop, to a datacenter somewhere, to the router/switch/AP 5m away from me, back to the datacenter, and back to my laptop.

Years ago a small telco I worked for bought an equipment from rather reputable manufacturer at some point. A year or so later we discovered a grave bug in the software. There was a month or so silence from manufacturer and they just bought all equipment back. We found out later that entire team working on this equipment was fired during restructuring by accident (!) and there wasn't any knowledge about this equipment left in the company.

It would've been even cheaper if they didn't need a dedicated app at all.

AI replacements

If you walk into a BestBuy and purchase a new one today, it arrives pre-bricked. That seems to meet the definition just fine