Yup. There are two situations here:
- I’m in my house and can hear the sound
- I’m not at my house and don’t care when it finishes
If I’m at home and won’t hear the sound for some reason, I’ll just set an alarm on my phone. My washing machine tells me how long it’ll take, so there’s no guesswork here.
Not trying to defend stupid internet connectivity but my washing machine is in the basement in a shared laundry room while I live on the second floor of the apartment building. No way I’ll hear it beep so a notification would be very useful actually. This is a very common situation in Europe where a lot of people live in rental apartments.
The problem is rather that there needs to be WiFi access in the laundry room.
Is this washing machine yours? Or is it owned by the landlord? If it’s the landlord’s, that’s a different problem entirely, since now you need multiple people to have separate configurations on the same device to get notifications, but only when their particular load is finished.
I can absolutely see a reason to have “smart” laundromats for things like error codes, abandoned loads, usage statistics, maintenance history, full coin reservoir, etc. That’s the type of problem a shared laundry room would have as well, and it would be fairly easy to add a “tap to notify” feature where you scan a QR code or tap with NFC to get remote access to it.
But for a typical home situation where the laundry machine is the apartment or house, I really don’t see a point, and it’s just a liability.
