I was looking at making an IoT doodad recently that already had a pretty crowded market because everyone who is currently making the same basic idea, including US and Chinese manufacturers, sucks at software.<p>The one US-based iteration of this product, understands what consumers want, but it's software very much looks like it was produced by hardware people. It works, but only barely. I bought it second hand yesterday and there are already two software-only features I would add that would have increased the usefulness of the product significantly.<p>The Chinese versions are so damn cheap, I wanted to buy one, but their software (even from xiaomi) doesn't even meet my basic requirements.<p>Part of this is probably the fact that consumers (like me) are stingy and software developers are expensive, and you have to keep paying them even after you've gotten all the money you're going to get from consumers since people hate paying for subscriptions.<p>Maybe these knock off makers will get better with software, I don't know, but at the moment I feel like there's a big gap in what knock off makers can do.