#enshittified — Public Fediverse posts

On Hostile Suppliers

(a.k.a. this toot [could’ve | should’ve] been a blog post 🤪)
 
 
central thesis: in the current #enshittified timeline, every vendor is a hostile supplier & needs to be treated as such 😡
 
 
this applies to software vendors, sure, but also vendors of any physical product that includes a chip, firmware, or software [1] – which is increasingly almost all of them 😩

#Philips released v6.0.0 of their #iOS #Hue app on 2026-09-03. I have v5.73.0 installed on my primary device. as of today (2026-09-13), the latest release note that Philips have published for the iOS app is v5.70 from 2026-06-23 [2]

I expect that v6.0.0 is likely to have breaking changes, both because of the version number & because Philips (like pretty-much every commercial vendor these days) has a history of breaking or removing useful functions from their “smart” products

and despite the fact that there’s a toggle in the app for “automatic software updates” for the bridge & connected devices (a mix of firmware for the “smart” devices and software & firmware for the bridge) that theoretically lets you choose when (and whether) to update them, they also periodically force you to update all devices by holding your app hostage, preventing you from doing any actions in the app until you apply the firmware and / or software updates (like, you can’t change the brightness of a light until you’ve completed the hostage exchange)
 
 
I’ve long since moved to using #HomeAssistant as my primary UI for controlling our lights, including moving replacing all the automations I initially set up in the Hue app to HA – both because I want to minimise the impact when Hue inevitably removes or modifies features, but also because the Hue bridge (or app, or both) regularly craps itself when attempting to execute actions even though it still seems to be able to execute those actions when triggered via the API by HA ¯⧹(ツ)⧸¯

this is super normal & fine [3]

I’m working towards replacing the Hue bridge with a different Zigbee controller, but my spoons are finite & I really shouldn’t need to be the sysadmin of my own whole-arse tech stack to defend myself against the vendors who I’ve thrown a significant amount of dollarydoos at 😩 [4]
 
 
so yeah. every vendor is a hostile supplier & needs to be treated as such 😡
 
 
 
 1 i.e. “cyber-physical systems”

as Bruce Schneier describes them:

“Everything is becoming vulnerable [...] because everything is becoming a computer. More specifically, a computer on the Internet.”
…
“Your oven is a computer that makes things hot. Your refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold. Your camera is a computer with a lens and a shutter. An ATM is a computer with money inside. And modern light bulbs are computers that shine brightly when someone—or some other computer—flips a power switch.”

(Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-connected World, 2018)

 2 https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/support/release-notes/ios

 3 this is, in fact, not fine 😕

 4 I am taking neither recommendations for alternatives nor commentary on my technology choices at this time 🙅‍♀️