Proprietary vs Open Protocols: What You're Actually Trading Off

A proprietary protocol can allow tighter integration between a manufacturer's own devices and app, sometimes enabling features an open standard doesn't yet support — there are legitimate technical reasons a company might choose this route, not purely a strategy to lock customers in, even though that's often a side effect.

A device on a proprietary protocol generally only works well within that manufacturer's own ecosystem, and integrating it into a broader multi-vendor system later requires a specific, sometimes difficult or unavailable, bridge — versus an open-standard device, which is far more likely to integrate cleanly with whatever other systems you add down the line.

It's reasonable to accept a proprietary protocol for a device offering genuinely unique capability not available elsewhere, but for commodity device categories (basic sensors, switches) where open-standard alternatives exist and perform comparably, favouring the open standard generally protects future flexibility at little or no real cost today.