You should check the connections it makes. From the review of a sister product:
“Now for the bad news. In the last 24 hours my network security blocked: 6,936 calls to AMS ("The Cloud"); 9,523 calls to s000.linkplay.com, 6,050 calls to www.yahoo.com; 6,050 calls to www.microsoft.com; 9,650 calls to Amazon Technologies; 6,049 calls to Aliyun Computing - Beijing China;3,468 calls to Google; That was 94% of the attempted connections outside of LAN.”
That makes zero sense to anyone who’s ever worked on hosting things in China.
Their Great Firewall makes it a no-go for practically everything and everyone. At the best of times the latency and packet loss are hideous, with abysmal throughput. And then you get cut off randomly for hours, days, or decades at a time on the whim of random CCP members with no recourse.
Paying them is a giant pain in the arse as well.
It is quite literally never the best option.
Hosting sites in Russian — in the middle the current war — would make more sense!
If you're in the western world, you really should consider avoiding IoT devices that call home to Chinese servers. You could be turning yourself into a potential botnet member if things go geopolitically sideways by keeping these products on your network. If you have access to other networks from home, you're inviting access into those networks from a box that should only be there for streaming music.
Better if things don't call home at all, but second best is choosing western servers under control of western actors.
I hope that one day we no longer have to consider the political origin of servers our devices to call back to, but that's a few years away at least. In the meantime, devices that call back to noone are still the best.
Apparently those requests weren’t necessary for using the device, so arguably it shouldn’t do them without user consent in the first place, and certainly not retrying multi-thousand times per day. It just shows that data economy and privacy wasn’t a design consideration of the software, which should be a red flag.
“Now for the bad news. In the last 24 hours my network security blocked: 6,936 calls to AMS ("The Cloud"); 9,523 calls to s000.linkplay.com, 6,050 calls to www.yahoo.com; 6,050 calls to www.microsoft.com; 9,650 calls to Amazon Technologies; 6,049 calls to Aliyun Computing - Beijing China;3,468 calls to Google; That was 94% of the attempted connections outside of LAN.”