I am not by any means an engineer so you can most definitely take what I say with a grain of salt. But my understanding is that all that really needs to happen for IoT devices to be usable by a third party is for the manufacturer to simply publish the API and provide a mechanism for the end user to control what interfaces with the API. It doesn't actually require you to standardise the API as you have never guaranteed compatibility with any third party it simply requires documentation, which would have to already exist internally for development purposes, and on some level some loss of control. But surely, this way you then get to maintain control and development for as long as you want to support it and for those people that then want to support it themselves after you have abandoned it can as API is a known entity. I am probably fundamentally misunderstanding an aspect of the development of this somewhere but this does not seem that burdensome to me I don't even see the necessity of a standard that needs maintaining here just documentation of the API and a mechanism to change where the data is sent. Hell if you want to maintain control for the life of the device fine, but what is so hard about releasing that information when you no longer want anything to do with it, what possible commercial value does that information hold then?
> ... for the manufacturer to simply publish the API ...
That is more work than not publishing the API. How much more work then? I'd pick stats from The Mythical Man Month where they claimed that doing something for external consumption is nine times the effort than internal only. Admittedly it does predate AWS, containers etc, but then again those aren't that useful for iot.
Ok makes some sense but why not just provide the API and a mechanism to change where data is sent after you have decided not to support the device anymore? Surely that is not to burdensome and will give someone out there the option to continue using the device (and probably save some goodwill over the dropping of support)?
