This feels like bad design
Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.
Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.
In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was “related to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”
Some user reports have also conflicted with Petlibro’s claims about offline functionality. As The Verge pointed out, various users online claimed that during the outage, their devices did not perform any scheduled feedings, performed some feedings but not others, or performed feedings late (examples here, here, here, here, and here).
Its not hard to just put some food in a bowl. Not every damn thing needs automation.
Some cats are psycho about food. Mine definitely, and screams at me for hours a day even though he knows when feeding time is and he still has food from breakfast. People recommend an automatic feeder because the cat stops associating the person with feeding time and bothers the feeder instead. I haven’t tried it yet, but it makes sense to me and would probably work on the fat cunt
It’s actually pretty handy, and can be useful for portion control too.
There is no reason it should require a cloud connection.
Useful for those of us born without hands and brains.
If you work long shifts or overnights, maybe your cats need food more often, so what do you do. Free feed, but many experts advise against that. Well, there are various options.
There are situations in which this device helps a lot:
i don’t have one yet, but we’re planning to get one so we can go on overnight or even maybe 2-3 day trips without having to rely on someone coming around to feed the pets
The cheaper non smart ones work all by themselves, no cloud needed. They don’t have an app to control it unfortunately though.
nice, that’s probably what we’ll go with, thanks 🙏
God forbid the user have to push a button on the device itself.
overnight is fine but for 2,3 days still have someone drop by to check if things are fine at least once. i read horror stories of cats being cats and landing badly from a sleeping spot and breaking a leg, or cats in a freak accident turning on the hair dryer which proceeded to blow warm air into the apartment for the whole night. and of course insanse stuff like that will happen when nobody is there to check in.
I think that he means just put 2-3 days of food out.
If the cat eats wet food, that’d have spoiling problems, but I suppose that it’d probably be okay with dry kibble.
It doesn’t need it, no, but it makes life a little easier. And in this world of constant demands on our attention and time, making our lives a little easier is a vast blessing.
When I think of accessibility, I find it plausible that it’s not just convenient but essential or necessary for some people.