Ask Paul: February 1 (Premium)

Welcome to February, and Happy Friday: Here’s another set of questions and answers to wind down the week.
Smart home vs. dumb home
JaseCutler asks:
I enjoyed the joke of First Ring Daily as the "best home lighting podcast". As I'm getting older, and putting up less with products made in this era of "move fast, break things early", chiefly being IoT devices, I've actually ended up getting rid of most of IoT stuff I had. I standardized to Rokus (out went the Chromecasts), set up Sonos, went to dumb lights, and left a Google home in the kitchen for timers at this point. To my question: After your rants on products getting it wrong, do you enjoy having IoT stuff? And I mean really. Do you? Or do you hear of my IoT-less house and go "I want that, but I can't because I review tech." If it's that latter, I'm sorry.
If you go back and look at my earliest articles about the smart home stuff---I think most of them fall under the Paul’s Tech Makeover category---you’ll see that I always intended to approach this in measured steps, to be “smart” about which technologies we adopted and which we ignored. And as I discussed with my wife, and then publicly via the site, I knew we’d make mistakes. And that, in some cases, we’d head down some path, realize it wasn’t working out, and backtrack.

For us, the biggest wins are the Chromecast/Google Cast-based whole house audio and the smart lights, both of which we use and enjoy regularly. And the cord-cutting, which---after some fits and starts---is just working for us now. The recent issues with the Philips Hue stuff are pretty much par for the course for me. I mean, I screw around with technology all the time, so something is always biting me in the butt. But in this case, it’s particularly problematic because it’s not just me that’s affected, and because I don’t really know what’s going on.

As an aside, a reader emailed me last night telling me to use the “Clean up” function for the Hub in the Hue app, and that doing so can, among other things, remove any hidden schedules we may have. So I tried it, and the lights did not change colors last night. One night does not a solution make: We’d gone at least two nights in the past without any change. But I’m hopeful that solves it. Otherwise, I will go through the painful process of removing---and then re-adding---every single Hue light in the house.

Back to the central point of your question, we don’t have a smart home per se. We have a traditional home in which a few things are “smart.” And we intend to keep it that way, generally. But I did write about some ideas for 2019 earlier in Paul’s Tech Makeover: Here’s to an Even Smarter 2019 (Premium).
Apple v. Facebook (and Google)
Lvthunder asks:
Do you think Google and Facebook will get their Enterprise iOS certificate back?
So, it looks like this has resolved itself for now. I assume Apple’s point was made. But with regards to changing Facebook instituti...