As someone with a lot of experience in the mobile app space, and tangentially in the IoT space, I can most definitely believe this, and I am not surprised in the slightest.
Our industry may "move fast", but we also "break things" frequently and don't have nearly the engineering rigor found in other domains.
So eventually if they remove the keys from the device, messages will have to go through their servers instead.
You want to think through that one again? With the OpenAI key on device it means anyone could use that key to call (and bill) OpenAI's APIs. It's absolutely not feasible to ship the OpenAI keys on device.
Since debugging hardware is an even higher threshold, I would expect hardware devices this to be wildly insecure unless there are strong incentive for investing in security. Same as the "security" of the average IoT device.
But that at least turns it into something customers will notice. And companies already have existing incentives for dealing with that.
(There's a reason Apple can charge crazy markups.)
Apple have a reputation and brand that allows them to charge premium prices.
IKKO seems, at least to me, to be effectively a disposable brand. If their reputation goes bad, their only reals costs are setting up a new website/AliExpress Store/Amazon seller account.
Yes, you can run with disposable brands. It's a perfectly viable business strategy in many cases.
However: if you do that you are missing out on the benefits of building a good reputation. Even in the cases, where your product _is_ actually good.
So another perfectly valid business strategy is to build a longer lasting brand. Like Apple has done. (Or countless other companies.)
In most markets we see both kinds of strategies at play. As a customer, you can usually decide which kind of strategy you give your money to.