Might as well just go to rent a center instead of buying smart shit.
This is yet another example of businesspeople taking laypeople for a ride. They want a lifeline to your wallets.
If you want fancy IoT that's quick to set up, look for Matter devices with full offline support
While the Matter spec requires offline control support, it doesn't require full OEM independence, so you have to look up the individual devices first to check if they're independent. The main difference being that some OEMs have a lot of extra features outside the Matter spec and other extras which require an account and device registration, etc, so check that the specific features you want works FULLY offline and with 3rd party apps. (I've seen Matter controller devices with screens and whatnot which are only configurable with the OEM app)
You can use Home Assistant with its Matter module (open source) as your home controller, together with necessary radios (specifically Thread/Zigbee), and firewall off your devices if you want full control.
And Home Assistant of course also has support for a little bit of everything, like MQTT and custom HTTP commands and more, so you can still control random devices even if they don't support Matter
Tech feudalism needs to be made 100% illegal.
Laissez-faire means it's up to the (stupid) customers to stop buying this crap just because businesspeople told them to.
Unfortunately, customers just aren't that smart despite how much excess wealth they may have.
Sort of, but we don't have laissez-faire capitalism.
I'm imagining some poor rube who bought fully into the IoT. Like every appliance they own is smart. Then one day they wake up to their entire house no longer functioning because the smart devices can't connect to whatever services they need. Can't even work the smart locks on their doors.
IoT isn't exactly reliable and many, including the rich are trying to reverse the IoT trend: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/real-estate/tech-free-homes-luxury-trend-1236177909/
also
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/23/analog-bag-screen-free-wellness
Calm down, Francis, the thermostat can still be used and programmed manually. The only features lost are remote settings which we never used once.
Not the user you were responding to, and you're correct about these thermostats, but not all devices retain functionality without internet connectivity. For example, these $2000 dollar 'smart' beds.
Some reported on Reddit that they were woken up by their bed suddenly readjusting their preferred sleeping temperatures -- some soaring as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Others say their bed became stuck at an extreme incline. According to The Washington Post, some beds also blinked flashing lights and sounded wake-up alarms.
These things became contorted, overheating (or freezing) bricks when AWS went down last week and the owners had no control over them without the app.
Which may suck for people who needed it for vacation homes, or worse, to help their old parents or something like it
I was never able to really make all that stuff work in the first place so I've got three "smart" bulbs I bought in maybe 2018 that still (mostly) work, and am generally switching my smart plugs to mechanical timers because I only really use them for grow lights.
I do feel better about being away from home overnight in winter with my weather station (which includes a sensor inside the house) but everything adds nothing to my life at all.
Pretty much happening if support disappears for 2.4GHz wifi. Most of these smart devices require it, and many wifi routers don't even bother transmitting it unless you specifically activate that option.
We adopt new tech simply because it exists, not because it is wise to do so.
Once we were manipulated into believing that our desires were needs it was quite easy for them to get us to buy whatever they wanted us to.
I bought a $500 dollar video security system and they pulled this shit on me. Not Google, but Arlo. Not even a 'hey we will just disable some of the cloud benefits' just straight up disabled my shit and gave me a shitty 'heres 10 percent off a new system!' email. I don't buy into smart always connected tech much as is, but that was def a reason for me to not buy anything further.
Joke's on them, mine hasn't been connected since about 2018. Works very well as just a thermostat
Release the specs so users can maintain them themselves.
On the other hand, one can understand why Google doesn't want to continue to pour resources into an ancient platform just to keep it on life support.
Bullshit. “Pour” my ass. Issue a legacy build of the app that controls them and walk away. What horseshit. This is shameful. The only reason it won’t blow up into a huge debacle is that these products targeted wealthy early-adopters in the first place and those folks can afford to upgrade, and most probably already have.
There is a ~~class action~~ "mass arbitration" against Google for this: https://www.classaction.org/nest-thermostat-support-arbitration
Additionally, the Fulu Foundation has a bounty reward out for anyone who is able to get these working with something like Home Assistant.
The pot is currently at $12,856.00 https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/nest-learning-thermostat-gen-1-2
In the U.S., since doing so would circumvent measures put in place on these devices, publishing how to do this would go against sec. 1201 of the DMCA. This has a risk of a maximum sentence of 3-5 years in a Federal Prison. You can still privately show the Fulu Foundation how it is done, and they will be able to use this information to help their case in their attempt to reform this law.
If you live in the U.S., you can also help by letting your representatives know about this. Here's an ActionNetwork page that Fulu set up so that you can easily do so: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/right-to-repair-reform-section-1201-of-the-dmca
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
