The last year has seen a tragic number of respected companies ceasing to exist, and for those of us using the legacy products of these organisations, there seems to be two possible and distinctly different outcomes: either we consider ourselves lucky for making the investment in durable gear while it was available, or we lament the fact that some of our equipment will become a paperweight once the company stops publishing the software.
Perhaps your narrator sees too much new equipment to be a fair observer, but in early 2026, it’s easy for film crew to load a cellphone with dozens of equipment control apps and still end up fumbling with unreliable on-set WiFi in search of yet another.
The thing is, using cellphones to create a user interface for a piece of technology is a very understandable thing to do. No film production equipment manufacturer is likely to beat Apple, Samsung or Google at designing an affordable, handheld device with a high-resolution display, fast processor, 3D graphics, gigabytes of storage, four radio data modems, an all-day battery life and Candy Crush Saga. Where apps involve open protocols like DMX, all is well. If one app disappears, others may be usable.
Still, people often conclude that innovation is the route to success in a mature market like lighting, winding up with a user interface represented as an n-dimensional fractal and controlled through the medium of interpretive dance. That’s a little beyond the capacity of an early-nineties control protocol like DMX which is really only a little evolved from a serial port. The app, sometimes, becomes the only way to fully control the device.
A stepladder in the rain
Some people will happily plug a lighting desk into a light and push the sliders around until it becomes clear how it works. Others will panic unless there’s a manufacturer-supplied control map available. Sometimes, there’s even a large, bright, conveniently-sited display on the device with an encoder wheel which never skips steps if you turn it too quickly, exposing exactly the feature you need in a way that’s easy to use from the top of a stepladder in the rain.
On other occasions, a designer will have realised that devices can be tiny, and minimalistic, look great in photos and cost less to make if all the controls are on a phone. In lighting, where there is a dominant open control protocol, that sort of exclusivity is rare. In other situations, devices can become minimalistic paperweights without proprietary software.
That has been a factor for as long as computer hardware has needed drivers, although until recently. Now, software is often downloaded on demand from any of a number of online resources with no easy way to retain or recover a deployable copy. When the publisher goes out of business, the software tends to vanish with great efficiency – and it can only last as long as the cellphone it’s installed on.
The clockwork technology of yesteryear would not have this issue even if it was software controlled, because historically, customers were often better looked-after. Several storied camera designers, including Beaulieu and Bolex, remain active to this day, servicing decades-old products. Mitchell spares were available for almost a decade after the company stopped manufacturing cameras. The sad loss of Mole-Richardson in December last year saw its inventory auctioned off, which was attractive because there were refreshingly few taps, clicks, or progress bars involved in its use.
The good old days
Nobody wants to return to the days when making a red light blue took half an hour and two people with a ladder. The instinct to put a user interface on a cellphone very often arises from the fact that modern lights (and radio microphones, and timecode slates, and smoke machines) are software-defined devices which makes for more features than can be comfortably operated while squinting at a one-inch LCD in the desert sun.
Alternatives exist. Devices with enough onboard resources can behave as a wireless access point running a web server, providing a user interface as a web page or allowing the user to download the app from the device itself. There are various concerns with doing this, though we’ll spare the reader any more computer science here.
In the end, this is a specific case of the more general problem with the transience of software and the increasingly cloud-centric state of computing. As to movie technology which treats WiFi as a remote control protocol, we could at least target a unified approach to multiple devices on a single access point. There is little commercial imperative, though, so don’t look for change here any time soon.