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And this is why "mandatory app to configure" is an instant dealbreaker for me for any piece of hardware. Don't buy crap like this. Force companies to be better.
When buying fridge, washing machine, oven etc, when I moved, I told the sales person, I like quality, am not price sensitive, but any device that requires an app or has a camera/mic built in is out of question. Some didn't know how to handle that, being used to sell it as a "good thing".
fridge, washing machine, oven etc, [...] Some didn't know how to handle that
I am surprised, all the European brands like Miele, Siemens, Bosch, etc. household appliances work fine without an app. Most that we have now do have an option to connect to WiFi, we never connected them and they all work fine with good old buttons like it's 1985.
XFinity (Comcast) recently sent my parents a new router, and AFAICT there was no way to configure it from a LAN computer.
It required a damn proprietary phone app, which I assume was bouncing commands through the internet.
The home appliance market is a scam fractal. It goes deeper than just ewaste.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they are more home decor and geewhiz BS than practical appliance for several decades now. You'll be perfectly fine buying cheap barebones models if you are repair savvy. Choosing colors and materials like black or white and stainless steel is "boring", but only if the surrounding space is already ugly.
I've had the same no name amazon special washer and dryer for almost 15 years now. Reviews were 3/5 stars at the time. People complained about belts slipping and hinges breaking. I just fixed them with parts on ebay. They still look and run like new.
I have an HP wifi printer, 5820 I think. I haven't signed in to HP, haven't connected the printer to cloud.
Same for anything else. I don't see the whole "oh you need firmware update to improve the product". 90% of the time it just works.
So what happens if the fridge isn't given internet access ? Or washing machine?
> I like quality, am not price sensitive but any device that requires an app or has a camera/mic built in is out of question
You probably meant "I want no frills product because of its simplicity, not because its cheap" but when that feedback reaches a PM, they'll only hear "I will pay more to not have a camera or a mic".
I said that about cars on here and got called all kinds of an idiot for not wanting electrically-operated door handles, an always-on phone connection, and screens bigger than the telly in my living room.
I paid £50 more for a washing machine without wifi/app.
If it's a "router" and you can't install a OpenWRT on it, then it's an absolute no-brainer to not to buy it.
To whom? How many people who have bought these things ever heard of OpenWRT? How many of those are capable of installing it?
Have you ever considered upgrading your refrigerator? Washing machine? Kettle? A router is a transparent appliance to most people.
> And this is why "mandatory app to configure" is a dealbreaker
More and more IP cameras can't be set up without a phone app. TP-Link's Tapo line is really bad about it. Even some Reolink cameras can't be setup on their own.
Now that high quality, affordable brands like Dahua got banned (w/o evidence), there's less pressure on the survivors to not be awful.
I don't disagree, but it's funny that Apple's AirPort routers, which have been axed almost a decade ago, can still be configured with the AirPort app. Years ago, I temporarily hooked up an old AirPort Extreme to replace a broken router, and it even got an update (probably a security update).
At any rate, I think as much as web vs. app, IMO companies should be forced to support their appliances for a certain time period by law (the EU has rolled out a law to require this for some device types). If it was normal for a router to work for 10 years or a washing machine for 20 years, a vendor should be forced to support it for that amount of time since the last sale.
Friend of mine had some (non-Motorola) router that her ISP provided her and the only way to set it up was through an app. The first time I ran into this I couldn't believe it, there was simply no way to set this piece of s*t up without using the app, which (a) didn't work until we'd spent ages faffing around with it and (b) was just a glorified set of different wizards that let you set things up in a few fixed preconfigured ways.
This is quite literally one of my two grievances against Ubiquiti at the moment: its intense requirement for mobile apps for initial setup.
Stop mandating apps that will eventually break or cease being supported. Give us an OOBE that can be run independent of some mobile app.
I just wish:
- it was more clear when buying a product that an app is required to activate/use/etc a device
- that people who rebelled against this kind of nonsense were backed up by others and respected "more power to you!"
I fear that this will eventually happen to all Amazon Eero products, which has partnerships with telcos in my country for "free" routers.
According to Google Play reviews for the MotoSync+ app, this issue is
due to server license expiring, after the host ended operations and
has been in play since at least May 12
The latest issue is "Server Licence Expired". I have been
unable to manage devices for months. So..I reset my router.
I no longer have a mesh network. I have only the single
point router and still unable to manage devices.
The licence verification issue continues. I found out this
is because a 3rd party managed the Server and folded.
3 weeks of almost daily Chat promises to connect to a
specialist which never materializes.
I left some chats open for hours.
I haven't been in the market for a WiFi router for a long time so I thought all the consumer stuff still used a web server for config. Enterprise stuff is either the same or has a serial port. In any case, it doesn't make sense to require a separate app that they also have to spend resources maintaining when their users will already have a browser they can use, so I suspect the only reason is the app collects usage information that they can sell...
On the bright side, maybe someone can get Claude or some other LLM to figure out how to crack it; and perhaps even vibe-code an alternative app.
> On the bright side, maybe someone can get Claude or some other LLM to figure out how to crack it; and perhaps even vibe-code an alternative app.
LLMs are great for this, though the more people use it for blackhat style things, the more I fear they will lockdown LLMs which are useful for reversing things that are legacy as heck and abandonware.
Regular consumers increasingly use apps to do stuff instead of web browsers. They seem to prefer it this way.
And at least for connected devices at home, a dedicated app can have lower friction for initial setup for the "I'm not a computer person" crowd than other alternatives do.
(I know, I know. It's terrible. It even feels something like betrayal sometimes. But that's how it be, anyway -- and you and I are powerless to do anything about it.)
> “It suddenly stopped working, and no one knows why.”
Based on the screenshots I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s because someone forgot to update, or just stopped paying for, the server license.
If these apps were entirely local nobody'd care.
The insistence they go through a server is why they suck
Or a key employee who was handling that died, quit, or was fired.
Ridiculous to have no way to configure a router via some normal method, like local web UI or serial/ssh console, or whatnot. Even more ridiculous this app does not satisfy itself with a local wifi/bt link to the router, and needs some "server" with "expiring license" whatever that is. Triple ridiculous this costs more than $50.
there is an explanation: Motorola is extremely bad at software.
opinion based on their support system, correspondence and android updates,
These WiFi products and the associated app aren’t actually from Motorola.
As mentioned in the article, they are products of Premier LogiTech, LLC, who have licensed the Motorola brand name.
I don't know, my first "smart" phone was a Motorola Atrix 4G. You know, that one with (one of) the first fingerprint scanner and that thingy that allowed you to dock it to something like a laptop and thus you'd have a working laptop thingy.
Its wifi/bt card broke exactly one year after I bought it. It worked exactly for 365 days. That was 100% hardware failure and planned obsolescence.
Needless to say never bought not even looked at anything Motorola ever since.
There is no singular Motorola. The company has been spinning off different parts of itself for quite a long time.
In 2011/2012, it was divided into different parts. The biggest were Motorola Solutions (mostly focused 2-way radios and related communications infrastructure; stuff commonly used by public safety entities) and Motorola Mobility (mostly cell phones and related stuff).
Google bought Motorola Mobility. It has been said that this was because Google wanted their patent portfolio. In 2014, Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo: The same Lenovo that makes ThinkPads is also who makes Motorola phones today.
Somewhere along the line, their name also got licensed out for home networking bits. That appears to be the products that the Mashable article writes about. This history is murkier, but it appears that some combination of Premier LogiTech and Boundless Devices (whoever tf these companies are) is responsible for making the Motorola-branded routers in question.
---
tl;dr, the Motorola that makes the radios that cops carry on their hip, the Motorola that makes Android phones that consumers carry in their pocket, and the Motorola that makes home routers are not the same company. Like -- at all.
Conflating them is easy because it is, frankly, a confusing mess.
But still: The shitty software on a Motorola phone is not cut from the same cloth as the shitty software on a Motorola router. They're products of very different companies that share nothing but a common trademark.
I don't know what happened here, but if someone told me that a manager fired all of the dev team and replaced them with cheaper overseas replacements, I wouldn't be surprised.
Years ago a small telco I worked for bought an equipment from rather reputable manufacturer at some point. A year or so later we discovered a grave bug in the software. There was a month or so silence from manufacturer and they just bought all equipment back. We found out later that entire team working on this equipment was fired during restructuring by accident (!) and there wasn't any knowledge about this equipment left in the company.
It would've been even cheaper if they didn't need a dedicated app at all.
AI replacements
Is there really no jurisdiction in which this is illegal?
Give it a try, take Motorola to small claims court. don't be greedy but see if you can get them to spend a couple thousand in lawyer expenses for a couple hundred of claim.
I wish people would read EULAs and TOS's.
the Motorola MotoSync+ app is required to set up all new compatible
WiFi routers released by Motorola
You'd be surprised, at work we recently had a contractor install a new office network (growing startup upgrading from the home grade units we had before), they recommended HP Aruba Instant On, and the guy did all the setup on his phone with their app.
Now that it's my network to manage, I have to say that while it's a huge upgrade from the TP-Link Deco units we had before, the cloud management just makes it worse. The web UI is slow, probably because every click requires a round trip from my laptop, to a datacenter somewhere, to the router/switch/AP 5m away from me, back to the datacenter, and back to my laptop.
> and no one knows why.
I think we can make an educated guess as to why. Maybe we could get Claude to reverse engineer it to clean up its own mess.
Without minimizing the impact, we should not blow it out of proportion, either. It sounds like every existing installed device continues to work. "Bricked" is used too expansively here.
If you walk into a BestBuy and purchase a new one today, it arrives pre-bricked. That seems to meet the definition just fine
This is extremely disappointing corporate behavior coming from Motorola. I've had better luck with $350 unlocked Moto something I can use anywhere and comes with no bloatware. I like that part, do more of that.
explanation - they made wifi routers?
Sure. Many ISP-provided, Motorola routers have integrated wifi. Here's a few.
ARRIS SURFboard SBG6580
MG7700, MG7550-30, MG7315, ML240 (cellular)Motorola was my last Android phone.
Once they pushed an update that took 99% of my phones memory and I couldn’t install even a single app - I moved to iPhone and never looked back. Over 10 years and counting. I still can’t believe they literally bricked my phone back then.
So far Apple “just works”. Is it perfect? No. But I can’t imagine fuckup of this magnitude from them.
To each their own, I moved back to Android from iOS because it "just works", having to factory reset my device to install apps again after an iOS update was the last straw.
Many things in Android sphere 'just work', we have open standards and market forces to thank for that.
apple airpods pro 2nd gen 'just don't work' with say samsung phones (s24 in our case) - constant disconnections, pairing fails maybe 50% of the time. Come with apple phone to very same plugs, and they 'just work'. Over effin' bluetooth that chinese plugs for 10 bucks have figured out better.
Wake me up when I can go on filesystem and copy to my computer any damn file I want from the device running unix kernel that I supposedly own, like photos and videos I took, over open standard usb.
Probably AI.