I've been thinking about this same phenomenon. I reside in Norway, where, interestingly, five different car washes opened in 2023 within a 2 km radius of my local neighborhood. Remarkably, four of these are clustered within a 300m stretch inside a commercial park. Our local area has a population of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 people.
Each car wash is operated by a different entity, offering unique apps and subscription plans.
It's hard to imagine this being profitable given the circumstances. But what do I know, I wash my own car.
Honestly I bought freezer food bags recently and even they had a bloody app. Each one is stamped with a QR code and you can use the app to record what's in each one. Absolutely bizarre. I continue to use a Sharpie.
There is one by me that lets you pay wirelessly with an app. They have an unlimited wash subscription plan you can only get with that. I am not really sure how it works (bluetooth?) but I guess it would speed things up.
I would try it to puzzle it out, but its one of those spinnybrush antenna destroyers and I'm not gonna risk it.
It can use both. ZHA is included in base HA. Z2M is an optional addon. Z2M has better support for obscure devices in my experience. I Also strongly prefer the management interface in z2m.
WAGO pfc controllers series can do everything you mention. They are "just" Linux boxes with a fully featured integrated I/O bus (with any input/output type you can imagine). They can be programmed in pretty much any language and you can deploy with docker.
That said. Really large factories use DCS. (Distributed Control System) they are horribly expensive but integrates everything in one system. Controller programming, Human machine interfaces, MES and even ERP. Best known to me is ABB 800xA and Siemens PCS7.
It may not be ideal to praise commercial software in a GNU software thread, but I really enjoy using 010 Editor. It's one of the few programs I pay for. Its C-like template syntax (looks similar to GNU Poke syntax) makes reverse engineering binary formats easy and fun!
I was in university 2004 to 2009. We had a total of 3 UML classes. A whole semester of wasted time. The professor that pushed this got "promoted" to a non teaching role after us. Everyone with some programming experience saw UML as a complete waste of time. The people pushing it at the time had no actual use-case just pie in the sky dreams of autogenerated software. It was doomed to fail.
We have one of those exact machines at the office. It's okey. The coffee is alright. The number codes are a nice feature. It's annoying that the cup sensor doesn't recognise transparent glasses so you have to hold your finger over the sensor if you want a glass of water. I can't figure out why they wouldn't use a ultrasonic sensor. Oh well. First World problems.
The common water fountain/bottle refill stations I've seen in buildings often are from the same company and they all use this kind of sensor. If I use my reusable bottle that is pretty clear it has no idea it's there and I have to use my finger too. And this device is literally designed for the purpose of refilling bottles with water. If I use the same brand of reusable bottle but one that has colour on it then I have no problem.
You can join Phillips hue units to your own zigbee network without Internet or even the Phillips hue app.
Zigbee2mqtt and a cheap zigbee dongle is all you need really. You could add home assistant for a better interface but there is no need to involve Phillips or the Internet. One of the huge advantages of zigbee imo.
With reviews being useless lately, many people have gone back to trusting brand names. Though the only reason I brought them up was to point out availability.
One other really cool thing is they have a wireless switch that is powered by the act of pushing the button.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10