these bed owners are asking the same thing" why the fuck does a bed NEED to be connected to the internet?

To harvest your data, obviously. Which is also why they don’t allow local connectivity: you might stop them from being able to data mine you.

I would have assumed it allows a direct connection between the controller and your phone.

Lmao, good one.

Just about any Internet of Shit device I’ve ever worked on, ‘cloud connected’ means ‘cloud first/only’. If your device says it uses the cloud and doesn’t SPECIFICALLY say you have offline access, you don’t.

This is why my smart shit is zigbee/zwave, you can’t cut me off if you can’t leave my network.