Terra Kaffe

App is great 90% of the time, my issues are with two main things. The first is that it says that I put the wrong password in for the wifi, but won’t let me try to forget the network or put a new password in. The second (and not that big of a deal, just annoying) is that every time I open the app, it asks if I want to keep my steamed milk setting different from the TK standard setting. I promise nothing has changed in my preference since the last time I opened the app. I love the machine!! The app leaves something to be desired.

The app locks you out of the controls if your phone is on a different network than the coffee maker for safety reasons - understandable. However, it checks this by looking at the SSID (wifi network name) you're connected to, so if you have different wifi network names for 2.4GHz and 5GHz, a different network name for IoT/guest mode/a wifi extender, this app is useless. There are better foolproof ways to detect if you're close to the machine. This is false safety because nothing stops me from being on the same wifi name in a different country but controlling the machine through VPN. Reported this to Terra Kaffe and was ignored - be warned your smart coffee maker could be dumb because of this!

Took a few tries to get it to connect to WiFi, once it finally did it turns out you have to be on the same SSID to control it from the app, that is wildly dumb. Like many other security conscious customers you will run into, I keep all my IoT devices on their own SSID/subnet separate from my personal computing clients rendering the app useless to me if I want to keep my security practices in place. If you really have to verify the phone/coffee maker are on the same network just use multicast similar to how chromecast/airplay work, this will allow vlan traversal for most instances.