It’s more like if they sold you a lawnmower, but kept the key to start it, and now they’re dead, and someone bought their key cabinet.
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In my analogy, the lawnmower is the cloud server, and your sod is your smart hub.
But forget the analogy.
Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate.
People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves
They didnt buy a device that requires connected services. It could work locally. That functionality has been removed in an 'upgrade'.
They destroyed the lawnmower and now want you to rent one.
That sounds awfully like a dependency on services to me. If the device is designed for somebody else to be managing and pushing out offer updates to it on your behalf, that’s a service. I wouldn't buy a lawnmower where normal operation of the device let somebody else change it whenever they feel like it.
The point is that the dependency is artificial. The user you responded to said it wasn't sold as a service, as it had local functionality that was removed post-sale.
The customer didn't buy access to a service with a physical product to serve as support for that service, they purchased functionality, and that functionality is (potentially illegally) being taken away from them.
I understand why people are mad. I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.
Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.
> I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.
Are they? To me it looks like legitimate complaints and only that.
> Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.
It's unique in its illegallity. They're lucky these aren't very expensive products, or people would actually go to court and maybe force the manufacturer's hand for once.
I don't know about the home jurisdiction of this company, but I don't see any reason why this would be illegal in the US. Typically most cloud products outline in their terms that services and their features may change at any point.
People are just mad that services which aren't essential to operation are being used to force people into subscriptions, or to enable features which could've been implemented without the server (and thus without the additional cost to the company).
Like with Nest going EOL. There's no reason that it needed a wifi connection to operate. The server doesn't hold any useful information and just proxies instructions to your nest device when you use the app.
It would have been nice if rather than wifi being used to communicate with googles' servers, wifi was just used to communicate with your app on your device via the local network. Or bluetooth was available as a fallback.
Yeah, it’s buyers remorse. Buy devices that rely on cloud services, and you are at the mercy of that continued service. I just find it absolutely wild that some seem to be surprised by this in a technical forum of all places.
I’m a nest early adopter affected by the nest EOL. I presume you mean: there’s no reason it needs a cloud service? Because it definitely needs network access for you to connect to it remotely.
But if you are familiar at all with the history of IOT devices, the reason why cloud connected devices took off in popularity, is because they do NAT traversal for you. Most people struggled to set these devices up before the advent of cloud IOT.