6 makercampus.com
WELCOME
I
magine you are one of the early backers of
a Kickstarter that, like so many of them,
promises world-changing benefits in a brand new
smart device. You were not only early, waiting for
them to build and deliver the promised device,
but yours was among the first ones
they made. It was a little rough
around the edges but you and others
gave them feedback and you made it
work for you. You were on board. You
told others how good it was.
You were happy also when the
scrappy team that created the product was
acquired by a big company as part of a corporate
IoT strategy. You even thought that could be good
for you, too, as a customer — more support, more
developers, an even better relationship. It felt like
backing a band before they became huge.
But things change over time, which is the case
for SmartThings, a device that raised $1.2M on
Kickstarter in 2013. It was the one smart thing
that made all of the other things in your home
talk to each other, regardless of what protocol
they used. SmartThings became a company that
received $12 million in venture capital before
it was sold to Samsung in 2014 for a reported
$200M. But SmartThings change too.
Steve Texeira received a break-up message
in March that his v1 SmartThings Hub would no
longer work after June 30, 2021. The message
was even more irritating because it bragged
about the original world-changing promise of
SmartThings to “make every home a smart
home.” There are “over 63M users around the
world, including you.” Remember those good
times, it wants you to understand. It wants you
to feel good, even if it is breaking up with you.
Your device is being retired, the message says.
Retired? Did your smart home future age out?
You just didn’t see it coming. The custom
code you developed for it won’t work anymore.
Your friends in the user community, who shared
code with you, are also gone. You’ll have to
start over again.
“It’s just awful when smart home hardware
is end-of-lifed, particularly when that hardware
is non-trivial to physically install,” Steve wrote
on Twitter (find him at twitter.com/stevetex).
“ZigBee/Z-Wave devices are notoriously
annoying and time consuming to pair
with a hub.” We all have had devices
that stop working or become
outdated because of newer models.
But there’s something disturbing
about a “smart home” device that
retires before you do.
We don’t think much about the end-of-
life for technology, or our relationship with the
devices we have bought. Steve wrote in a follow-
up to me: “I don’t think about my microwave
oven getting bricked in a few years, but this is a
real concern for many smart devices.” A device
dependent on the cloud becomes useless when a
company like Samsung decides that it is not part
of their future. Steve would like to see stronger
consumer protections, a kind of “guaranteed
device lifetime or a fallback to a reasonable local-
only mode if the cloud service goes away.” Open
communities are also needed, such as the Pebble
Rebble which rallies support for a discontinued
smart watch.
Frankly, it feels a lot better when you
decide that your device is not working for you
anymore. This is not like that. Here technology is
abandoning you, not you abandoning it. You’d like
to stay in the relationship but it’s done with you.
In a future with robots in our home, is it
possible that they might decide to stop working
for us? Will a robot that you thought was yours
take all its machine-learning about humans and
go off to the cloud somewhere to become a gig
worker? When that happens, the robot, on its way
out, will remind you that now you have to pick up
after yourself, cook for yourself, and learn to do
all the things yourself that it once promised to
do for you. “Now you must remember to turn off
your own lights,” the robot will say, and you’ll be
left smarting about your not-so-smart home.
When Your Device Breaks
Up With You
by Dale Dougherty, Make: President
M77_006_Welcome_F1.indd 6M77_006_Welcome_F1.indd 6 4/11/21 4:29 PM4/11/21 4:29 PM
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