Cloud-Based Smart Home Gadgets Keep Getting Bricked Because You No Longer Own What You Buy
from the I'm-sorry-I-can't-do-that,-Dave... dept
We’ve noted more times than I can count how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it’s smart home hardware, or routers that become useless paperweights when the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that actively make your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will be the same product you think you own tomorrow.
The latest case in point: numerous folks had grown to really enjoy using a smart home device dubbed SmartDry. SmartDry attaches to the inside of your dryer’s drum and connects to your smartphone, and can inform you when clothes are actually dry (saving you money), when your vents need cleaning or there’s a gas buildup (saving your life).
Unfortunately, the company behind the device is shutting down, leaving fans of the product with a useless bauble:
The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home’s Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life’s servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, “cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer be supported.”
DIY enthusiasts could buy a ESP32 development board, load some custom code, and set up their own smart home assistant, but few folks will actually be doing that. It’s a bummer to the many folks, including the hearing impaired, that say no other device offered quite the same functionality.
SmartDry didn’t cost much (about $25), and its failure creates a market opportunity for some other smart home device manufacturers. Still, it’s just the latest in a long line of devices heavily reliant on one company’s cloud infrastructure that can quickly become both useless and environmentally wasteful should the original company run into troubles:
Cloud server dependence is a recurring problem with smart home devices. Smart home company Insteon seemed to vanish without warning in April. Insteon later blamed the pandemic and supply chain shortages. In June, a group of dedicated customers purchased Insteon and revived its services. Most of the time, shutdowns are more routine, like when a service is cut after an acquisition, or a large company loses interest in its smart home experiment.
So the real innovative opportunity lies in creating more resilient systems that can still function even if the manufacturer collapses. Enter the open source Matter platform, which is expected to launch this fall, and not only unify the fractured standards in the smart home space, but let all of your smart home devices communicate on a local network, without without the need for a controlling gateway and hub.
Filed Under: bluetooth, cloud, dryer, ownership, smart home, smart home standards, smartdry, wifi
Companies: connected life
Comments on “Cloud-Based Smart Home Gadgets Keep Getting Bricked Because You No Longer Own What You Buy”
I am hyped for the matter platform, but…..obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927
Does the new platform automatically create hyperlinks for fully formatted web addresses? Nice.
The ‘S’ in IOT also stands for support and sustainability.
The problem is there is always someone who seems to think ‘This time this company using the cloud won’t go under!’.
As I’ve noted a time or five, humans are stupid.
https://twitter.com/codepitbull/status/1086750509774655494
I work in IT, which is the reason our house has:
– mechanical locks
– mechanical windows
– routers using OpenWRT
– no smart home crap
– no Alexa/Google Assistant/…
– no internet connected thermostats
Companies are always chasing a few extra pennies, and it never works out very well. No one wants to have to do a captcha to unlock the door, and they really don’t need advertisers to know when you come and go.
Imagine if someone just built a platform that didn’t need the internet.
A hardened version of bluetooth or something new.
You buy the dryer alerter, register it to the base, and thats its.
No great mothership checking when you dry clothes and discovering that there is no real market for that data and they aren’t making enough so lets brick it.
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They hae, it’s called Home Assistant.
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Crestron has been out here since 1979
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Or the altruistic version:
They COULD do that. If they were brave enough.
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Except that they probably cannot afford the effort, or have the people needed for that still on the payroll.
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Or they’re trying to sell their assets to someone else
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I’ve gotta ask: as opposed to what? (Other than immovable windows, obviously.) Are there somehow IoT windows now?
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Are there somehow IoT windows now?
Actually, yes. There are some available on Amazon.
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It looks like they had the good sense to use a standard interface:
I hope nobody’s dumb enough to install this without some manual fallback. Events that might cause the power to go out are often events during which the window really ought to be closed.
(And, of course, windows do not cease to be mechanical when these things are involved. One could argue that adding a machine makes them more mechanical.)
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Automatedfenestration.com
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That would be very popular in Russia.
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So your neighbors can’t find out how damp your laundry is?
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Bluetooth is not meant for what they use it for.
They use it because its cheap and everywhere, where coding something that can’t be trivially hacked isn’t important.
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I imagine it’s also because the obvious alternative, Wi-Fi, is even more complex. You’re gonna need a TCP/IP stack and to support all the various types of encryption and authentication that are in common use. (Or run another network just between the sensor and phone; but then the phone would have to join that network in addition to its normal one, and I don’t know if phone operating systems allow that.)
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Unless you want your SmartDry type device communicating via the Internet with all the risks that entails, the only options are LAN or Bluetooth, and guess which one has the range you need for you to keep an eye on your laundry while mowing your front yard.
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If you buy a DeLorean or an Amiga PC and the company stops making it, or worse, goes under – you will eventually not be able to repair or find uses for that item. It’s a risk. At least in this case, the issue is not that a company simply closes a low-profit product line, like say, Zune.
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But the device doesn’t immediately cease functioning when the company goes under, which is what happened here. And btw there are people still driving DeLoreans today. I imagine some hobbyists can still boot up and run their Amigas too. They’re both obsolete, but can still be used.
Forgive my ignorance (I’m a little behind the times), but is there any valid technical reason that the SmartDry device couldn’t have relayed the message directly to your phone itself, rather than going through the company’s servers?
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There’s probably no good reason.
But, Apple requires apps to be periodically updated, and they’ll remove any apps that get “too old”. Since they leave no way for customers to install unapproved apps, iPhone users would be screwed within a year or two anyway. (As “reasons” go, this is neither good nor technical.)
I’ve never used a dryer with unpredictable drying time. The ones in my rental building run for 60 minutes, always, and we just have to hope that’s enough. Is the variance in some models really so high that the problem can’t be solved by a countdown timer, maybe with an extra 5 or 10 minutes added?
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But, Apple requires apps to be periodically updated, and they’ll remove any apps that get “too old”.
So just back it up to an SD card and periodically sideload it. You can actually do that now (although you’ll have to connect the device to a PC for the backup).
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If you put in a smaller load and they’re dry in 40 minutes, then you can save some money by stopping it early. Regardless of any variance in the dryer, there can always be variance in the laundry.
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Sending a text message always requires a relay server, which you can connect to via a mobile phone module in the device, or via some relay server. The mobile module requires a paid for service connection to work, and until and unless an Internet service associated with your mobile is offered by your mobile provider, that will be via some other Internet service provider.
If you only need notification when at home, a home server setup and network notification system may be possible, if the device can be monitored and controlled through something like Home Assistant.
Phillips Hue the worst culprit
Who can forget Phillips Hue lighting? When they released their second-generation hub with no new features, nobody was buying it. So they forced a firmware update to disable first-generation hubs! “We’re gonna hold every $50 bulb hostage until you pay our hub ransom. We’ll do this any time we need some cash.”
just like the ridiculous law ‘you cant repair what you’ve bought/ own, both of these laws want scrapping asap! they have been brought in by corrupt officials who took personal gratitude in favor of the people in general! talk about the most corrupt country on the Planet!!
bricking our stuff
Big tech companies have managed to convince corrupt or stupid congresscritters that they simply can’t negotiate with the public so their binding contracts must be valid and they can change them at any time, even after sale, by updating a hard to find web page.
What about states stating that the companies must negotiate terms with something like a public utilities commission AS A CONDITION FOR DOING BUSINESS IN OUR STATE. Then make the regulator serve the peoples interests and not accept campaign contributions to thwart our interests.
Smart devices really are for ignorant people.
Well…
The unit will be hacked in a few months.
Someone will dump the code on some platform.
Some troll will dmca the code for anticircumvention
The coder or a fan will upload to TPB
Life goes on.
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None of which should be necessary.
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Should is rarely reality.