Neato vacuum robots to stop working

Great framing, we’re incapable of maintaining a cloud solution that we built for a product we sold to you, so we’re taking it down for your protection.

I’m surprised that they aren’t charging their customers for such great service and attention to detail.

Companies should be forced to hand over the communication and operation specification of their IoT devices as soon as they meaningfully degrade the quality or functionality of a cloud service. This will restore trust in the ecosystem, avoid ewaste, and nourish a community of developers/hackers/geeks/users.

A great opportunity to bring up that a robot that operates 100% locally and is located within Bluetooth range has never needed a cloud account, has never had to become unavailable whenever AWS goes down, and certainly doesn't have to be reduced to a manual dud when its company ceases to exist. I wonder what whoever produced such "Systems Design" would have to say to customers now.

Neato made a line of (good) vacuum robots with Lidar.

It seems there were bought by a company called Vorwerk, and Vorwerk are shutting down the cloud infra.

This means the app, floor plans, schedules, no-go zones etc will no longer work. The robot can only be manually started by pushing the button on the device.

As an owner of one of these robots this is sad but not unexpected for anything relying on an app.

By submitting to HN, I’m hopeful someone can point me in the direction of open firmware or OSS projects that can help me restore the lost functionality.

It's ridiculous that people are jumping on the vendors bandwagon - control everything remotely, AI inside, etc.

Why the hell would I need the cloud to control a vacuum cleaner?

Sure, I understand that there are a lot of manufacturers today, and basically all products are similar, so marketing people are looking for any way to differentiate a product from a lot of others... but cloud-connected devices are a road to hell... hello LG, Samsung, Canon, Western Digital and others who change cloud solutions for hardware so often that you blow your nose and get a service cancellation message in the mail :)

This reminds me a lot situation with computer games. Maybe stop killing games movement scope should be widened to all the software?

Perhaps one day some jurisdiction will have the wherewithal to implement legislation to stop this madness. At the very least all the device and protocol documentation and crypto keys etc should be escrowed somewhere for the day this happens.

> This decision was not made out of convenience or incapacity.

I don't believe you...

> Robots still work: Your Neato robot will continue to function manually. Simply press the button once to launch a full house run.

Your title is wrong

Wonder why they built them like that? How was the decision made, just simply incompetence: they didn't know how to do it any other way, delusion: they expected to be become the Google or the Microsoft of vacuums: they'd never go out of business. Maybe just plain greed: wanted to milk their customers for extra features and disable them remotely if they stop paying?

Just another reminder we need a "Cloud and app free IoT" Good Housekeeping style label of quality.

> Robots still work: Your Neato robot will continue to function manually. Simply press the button once to launch a full house run.

The title is strictly wrong, the things that's being discontinued is the cloud platform.

Still shit though...

Then they will hopefully refund their customers.