While no home automation company is perfect, there is a lot going well with Meross and it’s customers. A steady flow of new products, regular updates and bug fixes. And making HomeKit/SmartThings/Alexa/Google Home accessories for only a little more than what most others charge for mediocre Alexa-only or Google Homely gadgets. I like Meross a lot and watch their releases closely. I do wish they would consider an option for us to be cloud-free entirely, much as Sonoff has done. There are many reasons to like the cloud services in urban areas. But in rural areas, you have to be accustomed to the possibility of days or weeks without DSL or cell tower internet services. Also without fresh groceries or electrical power. Or being snowed in or isolated by flooding. Or having an ice storm that pulls down power lines over an area of hundreds of square miles. Your power can go out for months. And you don’t have to be living in the backwoods for these to happen to you. At least 25% of Americans live in places that can turn decidedly uncivilized for days or weeks even months on rare occasions. We need resilient local automated systems.It takes vision by company leaders but rural America is still a great market even now, just as it was for decades in the last century.

This is a good app/product. Now, one funny thing to keep in mind (and so you don't make the same mistake I did): the parts attach to the metallic frame of your garage door. And metal, over time, can contract/expand a bit with temperature. Sensors have to align for the app to deem your door is closed or not. This means that, in the cold midwestern winters, the app might think your door is open (or closed) when it is not. This is something to keep in mind when you set it up to automatically close after a certain amount of time. So, there you have it. It took me longer than I'm willing to admit to figure out while my garage door would open in the middle of the night on the coldest days of winter: I had the app set to automatically close if opened overtime. Metal has retracted. Sensors were not quite aligned, app thought that meant the door was open ...and was trying to fix. Leaving it wide open!

We have lights, smart plugs, and garage openers. The garage opener can be a pain sometimes. I believe it gets glitchy due to the app disconnecting or connecting to the wifi from cell network when you arrive or depart from home. It’s the biggest irritation when you need to leave quickly and the app fails to connect and does this thing where it has to finish fully “closing” the garage door that didn’t connect. Other times I’ve had to call family to open it from their app because I loose patience, it’s literally like a few minutes lost but I come and go so much, just being honest, haha. However, it always ends up working and overall it is more of a convenience than not. Theft everywhere has escalated and I feel safer not having openers just sitting in the cars.The lights are incredible, never have had a problem working them through the app. It’s kind of odd through Alexa though. Some lights I can tell Alexa to turn off/on and it’s no problem, other lights, she won’t do. We added them all at the same time so I’m not sure what the problem is but I don’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole of trouble shooting, not that big of a deal overall. No regrets on any Meross products and they have been reasonably priced, which is most appreciated!

Update: if anyone needs further proof of how nightmarish it is trying to get anything done when your Meross stuff inevitably stops working, look at the essay they have ready to go for troubleshooting. What a joke. I wish I could get a refund on this lousy smart surge protector. —————After my horrible Meross Smart Surge Protector setup glitched because of Meross’ absolutely terrible app, it left an duplicate entry in my Apple Home page that could not be deleted through the default Home interface. There was no “remove accessory” or delete option and it was infuriating. Home only showed “device not responding” and I was completely stuck. I am extremely tech savvy, but this problem was a monster. I was ready to delete the entire Home and settings that I had so carefully set up and start over from scratch, but decided to do a deep dive on my options before going nuclear. It took more than an hour of searching through forums, but another commenter suggested trying Controller for HomeKit and within about 30 seconds of downloading the app, I could delete the broken remnants of the garbage Meross surge protector! If you have the same problem, you’re going to need Contoller for HomeKit. In a nutshell, learn from my mistake and do NOT buy Meross products. They are slow and unreliable at best and will fail and clutter your Home app so that you consider subscribing to a $30 app just to clean up the mess their stupid products make.