Every few weeks someone asks when Katto will launch an app-connected feeder — camera, portions, notifications, the lot. The honest answer: not until we can make one that fails gracefully. Today, most can't.
The failure math
A smart feeder is a chain: power supply → motor → firmware → wifi → cloud service → app. Six links, and your cat's dinner depends on all of them holding — precisely during the hours you're not home to notice. Every link we removed from Haven™ is a 2 a.m. failure that can't happen. Gravity has excellent uptime.
What the reviews of smart feeders actually say
Read the 1-star reviews of any app feeder and a pattern emerges: firmware update bricked it during a holiday · wifi dropped and the schedule died · the company's server was discontinued and the device became a plastic box. The product worked; the chain didn't.
What would change our mind
A smart feeder we'd ship must work fully offline, default to a mechanical fallback when anything fails, and never depend on our company's server existing. That's a real engineering brief — we keep a notebook on it. Until it's solvable at our standard, we'll keep making things that simply work.
Fewer things. Better ones. That occasionally means saying not yet.