Progressive enhancement is a crucial design principle for smart devices

Last week on Tuesday, Oct 21st 2025, AWS had an outage on one of its datacenters that had big effect on a lot of digital services and websites.

Some of the more bizarre examples were the smart beds that couldn’t be adjusted and that heated up to uncomfortable temperatures. As someone with smart home automations that didn’t even notice the issue, it inspired me to write about why so many smart devices are horrible by design.

When I’ve been building my smart home automation system at home, a key principle has been that it needs to be a progressive enhancement: if Internet or any 3rd party service is down, I need to be able to do everything I can do with automations: turn my lights on and off, start my entertainment devices and so on.

Any “smart” device that stops operating when a 3rd party service that’s out of your control goes down is not a smart device: it’s electronic waste waiting to happen.

For a brief moment of time in my life during the pandemic, I owned IKEA SYMFONISK speakers. They were “smart” speaker collab by IKEA and Sonos. There was no way to listen to music other than sending it over the Internet and at any time, Sonos is able to brick your devices, ie. decide it cannot play music and there’s nothing you can do. SYMFONISK speakers didn’t even have a 3.5mm audio jack to connect a device to it physically. So I sold them to a friend and purchased dumb speakers instead.

There are so many examples of shitty, user-hostile product design where internet connectivity and extra services have not been made an extra benefit but a required part and the hardware will outlive the service almost every single time. It means throwing away perfectly good appliances just because a company decided it’s not financially smart anymore to support old ones.

If your bed, fridge, car or TV can be disabled or made unusable by the company some years after you purchased it, you’re getting the short stick. You are being screwed over by the businesses who know you’ll come back to buy the next version when the only reason to do so is because they just decided it’s time for you to switch.

An outage on a service or network is an often temporary and short thing and not the problem itself. It’s the ability to permamently make your electronics trash and the fact that it’s inevitable because no company will keep all of their old services up and running forever.

I hope more people would stop buying devices and appliances with such designs because that’s the only message corporations listen to.