The smart home graveyard is getting crowded

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How it started

A decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast and cook it perfectly, the June Oven set the standard for smart cooking appliances. At $1,495, it was absurdly expensive, but it quickly grew a small, devoted following that expanded when the company introduced a more modestly priced model.

This past Tuesday, June went dark. Weber, which bought the company in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving its users with a sleek-looking toaster oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition to crisp that strudel perfectly. You can still use it as an oven, but there will be no support or parts, and if you have to factory reset it for some reason, that could be the nail in the coffin. Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.

June is just the latest in a depressingly long list of connected products that have arrived in the smart home graveyard in the last two years alone. The Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin’s WeMo line, Neato’s robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech’s Pop buttons, Bose’s SoundTouch speakers, and Sengled’s smart bulbs all lost their lifelines. While some were saved by local APIs and protocols — such as Zigbee, Thread, and Apple’s HomeKit, or a Home Assistant integration — most are like the June Oven, destined to live out their days in a zombie state.

How it’s going

The silver lining, if you want to see it, is that most of these gadgets degrade rather than die outright. June and Brava will still work as ovens. Nest Thermostats can still control your heating and cooling, just like the $30 plastic wall wart they replaced, and a Neato will still vacuum your floors. But the remote access, voice control, updates, and other smart features you bought the devices for are gone. Some — like Nest Secure — are now pure e-waste.

There’s always the possibility of a rescue, but it’s rare. Some enterprising user may figure out a way to connect a headless corpse to Home Assistant, the open-source platform that has become the default refuge for the smart home undead. When smart lighting platform Insteon shut down in 2022, its users bought the company and resurrected it. Bose reversed course and open-sourced its SoundTouch API, and Pebble’s founder brought the iconic smartwatch back to life after the Rebble alliance kept it on life support. June’s co-founder Matt Van Horn said on X that he tried to keep the servers online but to no avail.

The smart home has reached a tipping point. Many of its early pioneers are aging out — a decade plus is a long time for a startup. Most have been bought by bigger companies, likely attracted by the shiny thing but then quickly dismayed by the bottom line. Back then, a cloud server was cheaper to build than a local hub, but servers continue to cost money, and once a company decides to shut down a product, reasons to keep paying fade rapidly. This appears to be what’s happening to Level Lock, another former-Apple-engineer startup that produced a beautiful replacement for a common household item. Assa Abloy bought the smart lock company and abruptly fired most of the team. It’s still alive, but how long it will continue is a big question.

What happens next

Three things need to happen to prevent the smart home from burning more users: we need consumer protections; manufacturers need to step up and build in safeguards; we need to know how to protect ourselves.

Consumer Reports is pushing for legislation around connected IoT devices, including making manufacturers push a local API to a device before killing its cloud. This would allow it to keep talking to a platform like Home Assistant instead of becoming a paperweight. This is essentially what Bose did with SoundTouch, and other companies should follow that lead (I’m not holding my breath on legislation).

When building a connected device, manufacturers need to make it function without the cloud. Include physical buttons so it doesn’t rely on an app, and use local protocols alongside any cloud connectivity. This is a key issue the smart home standard Matter was designed to address: Matter devices can retain many functions in a Matter platform, regardless of what happens to the manufacturer’s business. Other local protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Bluetooth similarly help futureproof products.

I fully agree with Stacey Higginbotham’s advice to manufacturers that they need to “design for death from day one,” or at the very least plan to pay for the funeral. Amazon refunded anyone who bought a Halo in the 12 months before it killed the fitness band. Vorwerk promised to keep Neato running for five years; when that was truncated to two, it at least gave some users free replacements. Google offered Nest Secure customers a free replacement from ADT. None of this beats a device that doesn’t need the cloud to function, but it helps ease the pain.

My advice if you’re buying a smart home device remains the same. Make sure it offers local control, has physical buttons (or a direct remote control), and can operate “offline.” Don’t dismiss cloud-connected features; they can add real value, but remember that any feature reliant on a server could one day die. A gadget that only talks to the cloud is already halfway in the grave.

By the way

• Follow the money: The rapid collapse of the Brava smart oven traces back to a private-equity deal. As reported by Michael Wolf at The Spoon, Brava’s parent company, Middleby, sold its residential kitchen business to 26North just weeks before Brava shut down. The death of Google’s Nest Secure began shortly after Google invested $450 million in home security company ADT.
• The cloud is a business model too: Many companies keep devices cloud-dependent for revenue. Chamberlain, maker of the popular MyQ garage door opener, blocked “unauthorized API access,” preventing Home Assistant users from controlling their garage door openers through the platform, and developed new security protocols that blocked those trying to work around its cloud control.

Read this

• Tyler Hayes dishes on what made the June so good and why he’s so mad that Weber broke his favorite oven.
• This Consumer Reports investigation into the data that connected white goods like refrigerators, ovens, and washing machines collect is an eye-opening look at why appliance manufacturers love the cloud.
• In this excellent column for The Verge, Stacey Higginbotham outlines the dangers of smart home companies treating hardware devices like software.
• Kevin Purdy’s deep dive into using Zigbee and Z-Wave devices in his smart home for the first time is a great overview of the value of tried-and-tested local protocols.
• If you want to build a locally controlled smart home, read The Verge’s guide to getting started with Home Assistant, a local-first, open-source platform, and my interview with founder Paulus Schoutsen for more on its principles and ideals.

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