I think part of the problem here is that everything is so new, relatively speaking, that almost no company can actually trade on their reputation. If today a company was able to advertise on having sold internet connected devices for a decade and their earlier devices still worked well in some manner, then people might actually use that in their purchase criteria. Who can say that as of right now?
Compare this to other industries. For cars, you have companies with varying levels of reputation (and that ebbs and flows over time). A big part of this is that car companies (and dealerships) aren't continually forcing you into using their related services. Oh, they'll encourage you and try to set up situations where it's strongly encouraged, but they know that many people will refuse to buy if they had no choice but to service their vehicle at the dealership they bought it from. What do you think would happen if Honda decided that for the next model year all fasteners were going to be non-standard sizes and with proprietary heads (think locking wheel nuts for for everything)? After the first few horror stories, Honda would deservedly start getting a reputation for being much harder to deal with, and lots of hidden costs.
Right now we are moving towards a situation where all the IoT companies work like this, but they are all so new, and changing so often, that there's no benefit to a good reputation because there's no associated history to go with it.
What we need are standards. Google and other major video platforms could help with part of this. Adopt a github type model for youtube or some service like it, where it works as it does now but if you want a private device-driven stream of video to be accepted, there's a standard for that and you can pay a small monthly fee (or it's free. The standard is the important part). Similarly, a standard for how to change settings for devices would be useful. HTML obviously works, but being so general may not be the best solution for what amounts to simple needs. A REST endpoint that supports a few well defined routes for discovery of routes and descriptions of them, as well as a route to return the entire configuration for backup, might work better, especially as it could easily be embedded in a larger dashboard for other devices (such as a "home" dashboard).