I stayed in a hotel with Android lightswitches and it was as bad as you'd think
So sad. I find the mechanics here really challenging to overcome. The hotel management no doubt wants &quot;really cool tech&quot; for their hotel to show they are up to date etc. And they send out an RFQ which someone bids on, really cheaply. Knowing that by only doing the things the hotel asks for, they can throw something together quickly and cheaply for a big payday.<p>This is <i>exactly</i> the mechanism that gets people in trouble going to China for manufacturing. They say &quot;I want you to build widgets&quot; and they get a good price quote, and say &quot;Wow, this is awesome!&quot; because they have in their mind that &quot;making things in China is cheap&quot; but in reality its that if you cut a lot of corners you can make things really cheap, and since the contract doesn&#x27;t say you <i>can&#x27;t</i> cut corners, it is all &quot;perfectly&quot; legal. But the manufacturer knows what the buyer doesn&#x27;t, and exploits that information asymmetry to make money at the buyer&#x27;s expense without the buyer having any true recourse.<p>The hotel in question could have said in the RFQ, &quot;System will be impervious to network traffic snooping and at no time will systems or a guest supplied computer be able to access the controls in another room.&quot;<p>Had they said that, the price quotes would have gone up and had the system the author speaks of been delivered, the Hotel could recover the costs of installing it from the vendor. But they hotel didn&#x27;t even know they <i>needed to ask</i> for that since they no doubt would assume, &quot;nobody would make something that shoddy would they?&quot;<p>I learned about this when I saw one of the rules in a NetApp hardware contract that said &quot;Manufacturer will install all components shown on the schematic on the final units in their designated locations.&quot; That seemed really odd. I learned that before that clause had been part of the standard contract, there had been a manufacturer who decided unilaterally that half of the noise suppression capacitors in the schematic were &quot;unneeded.&quot; Units from that manufacturer started failing in odd ways in the lab.