How about a wifi feature that is useful on a LAN and doesn't need 'the cloud'? The annoying part of wifi appliances is that network connectivity almost always means phoning home to some server on WAN. Home routers or a separate box on LAN ought to have functionality to be the bridge between appliances and client devices instead. That's a standard I'd rather see.
Because most people don't have anything on the LAN that can integrate with the appliance, and with just a phone app and the appliance, you're limited in computing power, background activity and storage (you can't store all usage data on the machine itself, and you can't rely on the phone always being on the same wifi to collect the data and store it).
"you can't store all usage data on the machine itself"
I can buy 128M flash for $2/10k