How are you even going to use the device when Homey is offline? I just use the mobile app from the manufacturer in that case, which will just keep working and run alongside Homey, but that will stop working when you block internet access. If you cut off internet access, many devices enter setup mode as well, meaning anyone nearby can access them via Bluetooth/WiFi. That’s not very secure, so I would recommend to just allow internet to all devices.
I don’t know what “data” you mean here, but I allow Tapo and all other apps to collect (optional) telemetry, I just allow everything. I just really don’t care about TP-Link seeing when I vacuum my home (or any other device usage data), especially since that data doesn’t have any value to me, while the manufacturer might be able to use it to improve their products. To my knowledge, none of the devices I use collect any sensitive personal information.
Yes, that’s true, but I have had very few outages myself. One time a Tado outage, a few short Homewizard outages, the major AWS outage some time ago and maybe a few more that were so short that I don’t even remember them. If my own internet connection has an outage, local devices don’t work anyway since my network requires the cloud to authenticate devices, meaning that if I switch off WiFi to use the mobile internet during the outage, I can’t reconnect so the local network access is also lost. This is because of the high security (WPA3-Enterprise with Nebula Cloud Authentication, some devices also require 2FA via an captive portal, which of course also needs internet access).
Again, this is all just my own opinion and experience. I know others might think differently about server connections.
Anyway, I think this topic should be removed. It’s probably yet another scammer that will edit the start post with (or add) affiliate links to robot vacuums. I think I’ve seen a similar topic before (also with robot vacuums) where they had amazon affiliate links in the first post.
Edit: other scam topic with robot vacuums (don’t click the affiliate links!). As you can see there in the edit history, the affiliate links got added long after the post was created.
