Today, let’s discuss Xiaomi’s Bluetooth Mesh system. From my understanding, Xiaomi’s Bluetooth Mesh system is quite inefficient in practical use; it ensures system stability through a multi-gateway design. So, how is this multi-gateway implemented? In fact, Xiaomi manages the path selection between gateways through cloud software, which is technically sound. It adopts a main gateway and sub-gateway architecture, where gateways detect the signal strength with each device, leading to a concept that sounds sophisticated—the “proximity principle.” This seems intelligent, but in reality, it exposes the shortcomings of Xiaomi’s Mesh system. Its Mesh network is poorly designed, merely providing star topology coverage, which greatly limits the number of device connections and coverage area. A truly excellent Mesh system should have greater scalability in terms of device quantity and coverage area. Due to technical flaws, Xiaomi can only determine distance based on the signal strength between gateways and devices, essentially embodying a “star network” concept, where the core functionality of Mesh has not been well realized. Nevertheless, Xiaomi has leveraged strong capital support, brand effect, and marketing strategies to build an ecosystem over many years, almost monopolizing the DIY smart home market. Now, when individuals purchase devices to set up smart homes, most choose Xiaomi. One of Xiaomi’s strengths is eliminating intermediaries, making consumers feel they are getting a bargain, but in reality, the smart home experience provided is very poor—characterized by instability, high latency, limited device quantity, and small coverage area. This phenomenon can be described as “bad money driving out good,” where truly excellent smart home systems are pushed out of the market. A genuinely good smart home system should be plug-and-play, easy to install and debug, without issues of stability, latency, device quantity, or coverage area. In fact, such technology is now entirely feasible, but consumers only recognize the Xiaomi brand. However, in the future, major brands will undoubtedly bring better products and user experiences through open-source gateway protocols. Open-source device-side protocols can address issues of ecosystem construction, market education, and after-sales service, allowing open-source smart home systems to sell smart products like traditional products, with costs comparable to or even lower than Xiaomi’s.