addon-wireguard VS iOS

There are three major cloud components. Alexa and Google integrations both have open options that are documented by NC and you are welcome to use them. There’s a lot of setup as you need to deal with a semi-complex config on AWS or GCP which can be challenging if you’re new to those environments, but they work as well as the paid NC option.

The remote access proxy service doesn’t really have an open equivalent but there are tons of other supported solutions out there for secure remote access to your Home Assistant install. One example add-on, developed and supported by an NC employee: https://github.com/hassio-addons/addon-wireguard

In short, the paid cloud services provide an easier path to solutions you can deploy for yourself if you wish. Those services cost NC money to host, so asking for money isn’t too far out there. Of course, that money is more than what the cloud parts cost, and what we all get in return is a team of skilled developers working on the project and releasing everything for free.

2. Firebase Cloud Messaging, for push notifications (since we can't talk to APNS directly in HA)

FCM is a dependency I'm actively trying to kill off in favor of an implementation that is both end-to-end encrypted and talks directly to Apple's Push Notification Service. Apple would not allow a solution where HA talks directly to APNS as they do not want that many active connections, and it would require disclosing private keys for the App STore account.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/pull/2010

I too am surprised to hear this. GP can you point to said spyware in the GitHub repo?

https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS

Only issue I'm seeing right now is balancing the security of your setup with the lack of iOS support for client certs. Looks like it's under some amount of development, but not much movement in the past 3 years: https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS/issues/27. Since I use our family's phones as a presence detection, I'd need the this to work with iOS.