Arming your Raspberry Pi with Your Phone

Okay, so you want to turn on motion detection after you get to your car. Question is, how?

This is why Apple makes hundreds of billions of $ and no Linux based product ever will. You need to get it so "it just works" and simple people can use it.

Consider what I'm trying to accomplish just now - apparently, the only way is to turn your Pi into a wireless access point that your phone can connect to. Really? Yuck!

Once you've set up your Pi so you can get into it from anywhere (which is actually tricky - for a product you want to sell, you don't want to force your customer to hack the router to forward port 22 or whatever) you need to be able to send a simple command without such bs... How?

So, to compete with Dropcam is.. to say the least... difficult - at least for someone with my rudimentary software skills.. You don't want to have servers that your products need to log into - coz that increases your cost and commitment right away.. The product must be stand-alone and use the customer's Wi-Fi and internet.

So, How?
1) How do you go into this state where you know you need to look like and access point? If the phone's going to tell you that over the cellular network, why not just use the cellular network? (Because then you need to hack the router to tell it to forward port 22)
2) This is trickier than I thought - looks like there really is no way out but to have a server somewhere that your widget logs into and communicates with :( Thanks to cloud computing and the competition there, maybe this is less of a cost issue that I worry it might be..