As an owner of a few of those smart plugs I can attest they didn’t work properly when supported. You could get them paired in matter but they just fall off the network and never come back until you did a full reset.
I’m sure a few people didn’t have trouble but the Wemo support forum and Reddit were justifiably full of anger at the products.
Meanwhile, there are countless century-old (or even more) dumb locks in regular use, and they will continue to function even when some apocalyptic event destroys all infrastructure.
If you don't have the physical key available to you outside your house, you failed to have a backup option for the inevitable failure of the electronics.
If anyone thought for one second that any device which requires external "cloud" support would continue work beyond what is convenient/profitable for the provider then I have a wifi-only dishwasher to sell you. No, really - please buy it from me.
I honestly think mandatory local support for HomeKit standard is one of the best designs. I lost internet despite having power due to a city wide outage. Having HomeKit still work for smart lights and outlet + home assistant was awesome. Pretty much anything HomeKit supported will last “perpetually” for its smart features.
Sort of surprising that the app is cloud based rather than Bluetooth. You would expect a Bluetooth lock to keep working even if the cloud infrastructure was offline. And if the locks are only wifi, doesn’t that mean they would go through batteries like crazy? How long can a battery powered smart lock stay online?
When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local.
I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control.
And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution.
I hadn’t planned properly for a way to integrate a wired in solution into the joinary around the door due to the particular circumstances of where it was, so I needed something wireless, and nothing wireless was local only at the time.
What pisses me off is that it’s the one thing I compromised on, and it’s the one thing that bit me.
Now I have very little notice to find a replacement with the same features.
That means Zigbee and Zwave and use them with Home Assistant. There are many locks and devices which support either. There's a learning curve in the beginning, but once you set it up correctly not only you get privacy and control your own devices, you also get far more options for automations and useful or plain cool things in general.
I remember a year or two ago the FCC was here in the comments asking people about IoT and what we felt the issues were.
Sadly, I have no hope of anything to come out of that, not that the current admin really changed anything about that hope either.
This sort of shutdown should, immediately, with the full force of the law, mandate a release of a working version of the software and a working firmware update to switch it to that version of the software, that is licensed MIT or BSD, with full source code, that allows one to build the app themselves and keep using it as it was.
If you don't wanna keep rolling with it, fine, go ahead and move off of it. But this enshittified rug pull is infuriating and it cannot be allowed to continue this way. Absolute scummy behavior. Just fucking open source it, assholes.
I never understood the smart lock. Some other connected appliances make sense - HVAC for example. But unlocking my door with a key is such a trivially easy, failure-proof thing to do, and every smart lock I've ever seen so riddled with failure modes, that it boggles my mind anyone would go through the cost and effort to install.
They try to sell you replacement product in the same announcement:
> To help make this transition easier, we’re offering our steepest discounts ever on trusted smart lock replacements, available exclusively to Kevo users.
Are the executives confused by IoT, and it doesn't register that they are remotely disabling a product that they (the brand they bought) already sold?
Or do they know what they're doing, but they think a judge will be confused by IoT?.
(If only there were a mnemonic that would help everyone remember that ASSA ABLOY is to be avoided...)
There really are too few business models available to build sustainable IoT solutions, apart from subscriptions (and only Security companies seem to have figured this out), pyramid schemes (letting your new users pay for maintaining the whole solution), or plain old planned obsolescence (with forced upgrades, like with Smartphones).
I'm not sure what models would work, apart from regulators stepping in and mandating x years of updates, like with the European regulations. Which basically comes down to #3.
I'd recommend everyone who buys IoT devices first search if the device is jailbreak-able and/or guides exist that enable you to load homebrew software/control it with open source alternatives.
I have yet to have a single issue with any of my IoT devices because I always make sure I have an escape hatch when the manufacturer decides to pull the plug.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] threadWow, a whole ten years for a door lock.
Kind of like wemo's recent abandonment/EOL of their plugs... a big company like belkin can't keep an on/off switch working?
I’m sure a few people didn’t have trouble but the Wemo support forum and Reddit were justifiably full of anger at the products.
Some of these will have their owners on the other side of the world with no way to get back in time.
Keep this in mind next time you consider depending on Assa Abloy - bummer to see them lose their ways.
If anyone thought for one second that any device which requires external "cloud" support would continue work beyond what is convenient/profitable for the provider then I have a wifi-only dishwasher to sell you. No, really - please buy it from me.
When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local.
I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control.
And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution.
I hadn’t planned properly for a way to integrate a wired in solution into the joinary around the door due to the particular circumstances of where it was, so I needed something wireless, and nothing wireless was local only at the time.
What pisses me off is that it’s the one thing I compromised on, and it’s the one thing that bit me.
Now I have very little notice to find a replacement with the same features.
That means Zigbee and Zwave and use them with Home Assistant. There are many locks and devices which support either. There's a learning curve in the beginning, but once you set it up correctly not only you get privacy and control your own devices, you also get far more options for automations and useful or plain cool things in general.
Sadly, I have no hope of anything to come out of that, not that the current admin really changed anything about that hope either.
This sort of shutdown should, immediately, with the full force of the law, mandate a release of a working version of the software and a working firmware update to switch it to that version of the software, that is licensed MIT or BSD, with full source code, that allows one to build the app themselves and keep using it as it was.
If you don't wanna keep rolling with it, fine, go ahead and move off of it. But this enshittified rug pull is infuriating and it cannot be allowed to continue this way. Absolute scummy behavior. Just fucking open source it, assholes.
> To help make this transition easier, we’re offering our steepest discounts ever on trusted smart lock replacements, available exclusively to Kevo users.
Are the executives confused by IoT, and it doesn't register that they are remotely disabling a product that they (the brand they bought) already sold?
Or do they know what they're doing, but they think a judge will be confused by IoT?.
(If only there were a mnemonic that would help everyone remember that ASSA ABLOY is to be avoided...)
I'm not sure what models would work, apart from regulators stepping in and mandating x years of updates, like with the European regulations. Which basically comes down to #3.
I have yet to have a single issue with any of my IoT devices because I always make sure I have an escape hatch when the manufacturer decides to pull the plug.
Seems like the right time to switch to an offering that can't be so easily trashed.
...And Lucy pulls the football once again.
Regulations aren't as bad.