Google has officially turned these Nest thermostats back into dumb thermostats

If someone says Google can't be trusted for purchases of long-term, capital-style goods like a thermostat (or smoke detectors), I'd have to agree. The Nest I bought way back when may still be installed in the home I sold 10+ years ago.

But I didn't buy it from Google, I bought it from Nest (pre-Google) - a company that designed and sold high-tech gear that was designed to be permanently installed and (presumably) last a good long time. The acquisition was not a good match, but it is what it is - lesson learned and reputations lost.

(and the design, honestly, was more down Apple's lane than Google's - I thought the former would be more likely to buy them out, not that it guaranteed any different results).

What a coincidence, I am working on deploying the https://nolongerevil.com/ on my 2nd Gen Nest Thermostat, my wife has bugging me for weeks to either fix it or buy a new one.

I am actually going to self-host and vibe code my own cloud service on Cloudflare.

This thing was released in 2011, and can be replaced in 5 minutes for like $100. This is probably longer than any "smart" device from any manufacturer has ever worked. Not everything needs to be an anti-Google crusade.

On one hand, I obviously can’t legitimately expect the manufacturers of these things to support their older hardware offerings ad vitam aeternam.

On the other, it’s a freaking thermostat controller. An appliance. I don’t want to have to replace appliances before they break, and software breaking it is unacceptable.

I’ve been largely holding off on domotics because so much of it reeks of premature obsolescence... Maybe someone over here has good experience with Home Assistant et al?

Nest is a disaster. Same with their fire alarms. I spent a small fortune buying those, just to rip them out and dump into garbage. Google hardware - never again.

The emudhra debacle might turn out to be an accidental boon for keeping devices like this running.

To a point anyway.

is there nest alternative somewhere that does not need cloud

I wonder if someone could just reverse engineer the firmware and made your own updates and app?

How much could it possibly cost to keep these working?

Another case of a smart home device that unnecessarily needs someone else's servers. They could've made it controllable over the local network and that would've solved, like, 80% of this issue.

I have a z-wave hub I bought about 8 years ago. Admittedly, it's shit, but it does one thing right — you only need the manufacturer's cloud services if you want to control it from outside of your LAN, or if you want integrations with other services.

The law should require that if a company sells hardware that depends on an internet service, and later discontinues that service, it must open-source the communication protocol and provide a way to connect the hardware to alternative services. This requirement should cover every feature that was functional when the device was sold.

Fortunately Nest owners got lucky this time and there was an escape hatch that allowed projects like No Longer Evil. But there's a long list of devices that have been bricked when their manufacturers shut down a proprietary backend.

I would never buy an appliance that requires a third-party server. Google cannot remove the value from a Zigbee or Z-Wave thermostat like this.

Honestly, given the surveillance capitalism of it all, I take this as a win. The termostst should have been dumb the whole time, not an avenue for harvesting our data.

More dumb electronics please.