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).
I kind of think that someone who relies on this 100% of the time maybe shouldn’t have a pet. Pets need company and affection. I mean, I’d love to get a dog again but now I’m just working too much and it wouldn’t be fair.
It could be that their work schedule makes it so they’re not home for meal times, but are home for other times
It could be that people happened to be traveling for this and most cats are fine with an occasional day or two home alone.
It could be that some of them are really bad with daily scheduled tasks and need something to help take that load off.
Maybe consider not being super judgemental about how people manage their pets, there’s perfectly reasonable reasons why people might want, or even need, an auto feeder.
I use it to make sure that our pets don’t go hungry for long. So that they don’t eat everything and then have to wait for 6 or 12 hours until the next feeding. So I just feed them every two hours automatically.