From the article&#x27;s footnotes:<p>&gt; While on the subject of smartphone driven hardware, experience has shown me that software has a much shorter mean-time-to-obsolescence than hardware. Any gizmo that needs an app to make it work will have the service life of a bluebottle, as Apple’s planned obsolescence orphans the app with an iOS upgrade.<p>This has been my experience too and I wish manufacturers would remove the requirement on having an app to use&#x2F;configure the device.<p>Because of that, I try to make sure that such devices I design provides a basic web interface that makes it possible to setup and use the device.<p>This is impossible or at least difficult if the device is powered by a 8-bit MCU but with the dropping prices of beefier MCU and linux-compatible SoC this shouldn&#x27;t be an issue in the future.<p>Of course, there is also the issue of remote services that those devices often depends on, even if it&#x27;s not exactly necessary sometimes.