“I have a PhD in physics. I built lasers that spit out 80 femtosecond pulses, and I did quantum mechanics simulations.”
A $2,000 mattress ships with a cloud app that phones home to control the temperature of your own bed. So he reverse-engineered the API and wrote his own client. This is the tax of the smart-everything era. The hardware is fine. The software is a leash, and cutting it takes a physics PhD.