Will your IoT lamp stop working if the vendor goes out of business? That's what "Requires 3rd party service to function" means.
It's not contradictory with, "Updates itself regularly".
You've got me thinking about this though... If I were selling an IoT device today I would likely just outsource the majority of the self-update problem by using an open source Linux distribution as the basis of my product and merely configure it to perform automatic updates.
The product's software could be updated via a separate software repository (e.g. like a PPA). That way it would get automatically updated at a regular interval along with the OS (assuming I put out regular updates).
This would actually be an ideal setup for consumers too because if I went out of business or my software stopped getting updates the consumer could just replace the software performing the IoT functions or merely remove it and at least be left with a functional embedded computer to hack around with.
Obviously most consumers wouldn't do that but it'd be nice to give them that option.
It's not contradictory with, "Updates itself regularly".
You've got me thinking about this though... If I were selling an IoT device today I would likely just outsource the majority of the self-update problem by using an open source Linux distribution as the basis of my product and merely configure it to perform automatic updates.
The product's software could be updated via a separate software repository (e.g. like a PPA). That way it would get automatically updated at a regular interval along with the OS (assuming I put out regular updates).
This would actually be an ideal setup for consumers too because if I went out of business or my software stopped getting updates the consumer could just replace the software performing the IoT functions or merely remove it and at least be left with a functional embedded computer to hack around with.
Obviously most consumers wouldn't do that but it'd be nice to give them that option.