I have a pretty 'dumb' automatic pet feeder, and it's great.

The cat used to be scratching at my door progressively earlier every morning, and now he's just waiting by the machine 15-20 minutes before the food drops. Plus he figured out how to reach up the chute and get a few extra morsels, so he's 'happy'.

It's honestly improved my relationship with the cat.

Programming it is a bit annoying with the few buttons on the thing, so I guess a bluetooth app would be 'nice', but meh. I would 100% get another one if it dies, but I guess now I'll have to make sure it's not some AI/cloud nonsense.

I'm relatively certain that if it's a popular model and you were to do a quick web search you'd find that someone has open sourced project plans to retrofit your "dumb" feeder w/ an esp32 and home assistant to make it "smart" and locally controlled.

Given all the DIY wizardry being done by the Home Assistant crowd (and the huge amount of effort by the HA devs and volunteers to write integrations for just about every smart home gadget) it's really not necessary any more to have smart home gear that requires a cloud connection.