If anyone thought for one second that any device which requires external "cloud" support would continue work beyond what is convenient/profitable for the provider then I have a wifi-only dishwasher to sell you. No, really - please buy it from me.
What happened is that they are disabling the app, so it is no longer usable.
That means you need to keep the app project updated and all dependencies in reasonable form. It’s not outlandish if you are a big company but as someone who oversaw the development of platforms where you had apps dedicated to hardware - it definitely takes effort. I can understand why companies want to cut loose ends here.
It is just exactly smart enough for my liking.
1. a keyholder can't lose/forget the key 2. keys can be disabled without the expense of replacing the whole lock core
Since the purpose of a house lock is entirely a cultural/legal signal (you are allowed to come in / you do not have authority to come in) rather than security (if you are willing to damage the house, you can definitely enter), this is the perfect "smartness" for me.
Today, give me any HomeKit supported device and I’m satisfied it will work for as long as I need it to without some dodgy 3rd party app siphoning my data.
And let’s be honest, if you were buying fridges or washing machines based on WiFi features that’s on you. Locks and lights have legitimate uses for remote control and always have.
I don't understand what you mean by this? My clothes will smell really bad if I leave them in the washer wet. If the appliance has a leak, I need to be nearby to remediate. Thus its not safe for me to start the appliance before I leave for 8+ hours.
If I can remotely start my washing machine, just prior to me arriving home, I can move the clothes to the dryer.
This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat over at https://sett.homes/ . It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant. Nest has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I bet the same approach would work for the Kevo lock that I've got too...
I have automations, sensors, and weather in HA.
I'm looking at moving to a zwave thermostat now. I wouldn't have gotten the nest but it was a (re)gift and I didn't want it to go to waste.
Now Google made it waste.
Wow, a whole ten years for a door lock.
Kind of like wemo's recent abandonment/EOL of their plugs... a big company like belkin can't keep an on/off switch working?
I’m sure a few people didn’t have trouble but the Wemo support forum and Reddit were justifiably full of anger at the products.
The new ones, however, are unreliable garbage. I have no idea what they broke, but they were a waste of money. Same symptoms you report.
Some of these will have their owners on the other side of the world with no way to get back in time.
Keep this in mind next time you consider depending on Assa Abloy - bummer to see them lose their ways.
I suspect stories like "I left my house without my keys on the day they shut it down to go for a walk and couldn't get back into my home." Or "I somehow locked my keys in my car, including the backup house key. Luckily my backup car key is in the house." Only to realize the lock isn't working normally and there are 100 emails warning them about this in their "updates" tab.. buried under a mountain of spam.
There will definitely be people who wind up stuck with this, especially with such short notice, and it won't necessarily be because they didn't plan. Now I'm going to go double check my lockbox.
That means Zigbee and Zwave and use them with Home Assistant. There are many locks and devices which support either. There's a learning curve in the beginning, but once you set it up correctly not only you get privacy and control your own devices, you also get far more options for automations and useful or plain cool things in general.
> To help make this transition easier, we’re offering our steepest discounts ever on trusted smart lock replacements, available exclusively to Kevo users.
Are the executives confused by IoT, and it doesn't register that they are remotely disabling a product that they (the brand they bought) already sold?
Or do they know what they're doing, but they think a judge will be confused by IoT?.
(If only there were a mnemonic that would help everyone remember that ASSA ABLOY is to be avoided...)
I have yet to have a single issue with any of my IoT devices because I always make sure I have an escape hatch when the manufacturer decides to pull the plug.
When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local.
I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control.
And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution.
I hadn’t planned properly for a way to integrate a wired in solution into the joinary around the door due to the particular circumstances of where it was, so I needed something wireless, and nothing wireless was local only at the time.
What pisses me off is that it’s the one thing I compromised on, and it’s the one thing that bit me.
Now I have very little notice to find a replacement with the same features.
Seems like the right time to switch to an offering that can't be so easily trashed.
It’s also really nice to just leave the house and have it lock automatically behind me.
But I didn’t fall for cloud bullshit. It’s purely local and z-wave.
How so, should Apple ever decide they'll remove it from tvOS/HomepodOS?
And frankly, having to use Homekit for automations (or using it at all) is - compared to Home Assistant - frustrating, especially given their more or less unlimited resources.
And don't even get me started on Siri - compared to what it was when it started on the iPhone 4s i don't feel it made like any progress, at all. Having updated to iOS 26 a few days ago - congratulations, Siri is now failing 100% to "turn off bedside lamp" which worked fine on 18.x and ever before.
No, i don't think Apple is going to keep Homekit's lights on (heh) indefinitely - and wouldn't bet the farm (or house) on it.
Regulations aren't as bad.
Is it not enough to simply let the people decide who they want to do business with? I'm genuinely curious.
1. Buy $thing in good faith
2. $thing stops working for $reasons
3. Go to step 1
1. Buy $thing in good faith
2. It cannot be sabotaged by its own corporate creator due to legislation
3. Visit the Bahamas with all your extra money.Sometimes, it's a company that has done it before (e.g. Google). But not always.
I'm not sure what models would work, apart from regulators stepping in and mandating x years of updates, like with the European regulations. Which basically comes down to #3.
Then corporate finally realises that years of "user 000128571 locked door" log files are worth precisely f'all to advertisers.
Basically no one is going to run a business for the sake of customers or brand goodwill because, in the real world, there are no regulations or motivations to do so because "everything is a scam" is the normalized deviancy.
Take even a boring other industry, say single phase motor start and run capacitors. In the US, 3 of the 4 major original manufacturers of said products are owned by private equity and manufacture under under an array of cannibalistic turtles that M&A'ed basically every manufacturer. The net result is increased prices and shorter product life.
Mitch Hedberg just died too soon after YouTube launched to see it himself.
Sadly, I have no hope of anything to come out of that, not that the current admin really changed anything about that hope either.
This sort of shutdown should, immediately, with the full force of the law, mandate a release of a working version of the software and a working firmware update to switch it to that version of the software, that is licensed MIT or BSD, with full source code, that allows one to build the app themselves and keep using it as it was.
If you don't wanna keep rolling with it, fine, go ahead and move off of it. But this enshittified rug pull is infuriating and it cannot be allowed to continue this way. Absolute scummy behavior. Just fucking open source it, assholes.
This would be a fun reverse engineering project, probably!
...And Lucy pulls the football once again.