With those gimmicky features there's also only a slim chance that anyone is actually using them because it's often hard to impossible, especially for people with less interest in tech.
For example, in a large company like Samsung some product manager might show up and require that users of the food scanning feature have a Samsung account. Now you have to register for a Samsung account on your fridge, but the embedded web view is being redirected to a new thing with 35% heavier Javascript which doesn't really run on your fridge anymore and that's the end of that.
This example is made up but it wouldn't surprise me if things very close to this have happened on these fridges, and they definitely happen all the time in consumer electronics.
> especially for people with less interest in tech
Hum... I can program in something around a dozen languages, can find my way around the Linux kernel code as well as enterprise software, can administer OSes...
Yet, I am completely unable to set my fridge's clock (why does it have one?) since I lost its manual. I have spent some time trying.
IoT and smart things are a great equalizer. Nobody can handle them. Some times it's even not possible.
> With those gimmicky features there's also only a slim chance that anyone is actually using them because it's often hard to impossible, especially for people with less interest in tech.
True life example: I have a washer. It was sold as being internet-connected. There are some mildly interesting use cases I could see for being able to control or check the status of a wash remotely.
Well, it's internet-connected, sure, but you can only connect it to your network with WPS, many app reviews suggest the remote app doesn't work, the feature set is small, and the features it does have are hobbled in ways that make even that set pretty useless—seemingly in order to prevent lawsuits.
For example, in a large company like Samsung some product manager might show up and require that users of the food scanning feature have a Samsung account. Now you have to register for a Samsung account on your fridge, but the embedded web view is being redirected to a new thing with 35% heavier Javascript which doesn't really run on your fridge anymore and that's the end of that.
This example is made up but it wouldn't surprise me if things very close to this have happened on these fridges, and they definitely happen all the time in consumer electronics.