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The company decided your device was done

Joe Pantuso · October 2026

The hardware in your house can outlive the company that sold it. Whether it keeps working is a different question, and the answer is usually not yours to make.

Every device below was working fine the day it died. Nothing broke. Somebody at the company that made it decided to turn off a server, and the thing on your wall, your counter, or your dashboard stopped being smart, or stopped altogether.

The graveyard so far

• Revolv, 2016. Google's Nest bought the Revolv hub business, stopped selling it, and on May 15, 2016 switched every hub off. "The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work." Owners got refunds.
• Logitech Harmony Link, 2018. Logitech let a security certificate expire rather than renew it, and the hub stopped working on March 16, 2018. The first offer was a free replacement only for owners still under warranty and a discount for everyone else. After the outcry, everyone got a free Harmony Hub. The Link still died.
• Iris by Lowe's, 2019. Lowe's couldn't sell its smart home business and shut it down on March 31, 2019. The hub and every online service stopped. Some of the sensors used standard Zigbee and Z-Wave radios and could move to another hub. The ones that only spoke Iris were refunded with a prepaid card, if you got your claim in before the deadline.
• Wink, 2020. In May 2020 Wink told its owners that their hubs would stop working unless they paid $4.99 a month, starting a week later. No payment, no app, no voice control, no automations. The deadline moved after people called it what it was.
• SmartThings, first-generation hub, 2021. Samsung ended support on June 30, 2021, and the hub stopped doing anything, local control included. The upgrade path was a discounted new hub and re-pairing every device by hand.
• Insteon, 2022. The servers stopped answering in April 2022 while the status page still said "All Services Online." Then an email: the company was dissolving. Owners were told not to reset their hubs, because setting one up again needed servers that no longer existed.
• Google Nest Secure, 2024. Google ended the alarm system on April 8, 2024. No status in the app, no control, no alarm notifications. An alarm that can't tell you about an alarm.
• Spotify Car Thing, 2024. Spotify announced in May that its dashboard music player would stop working on December 9, 2024, and it did. Spotify's advice was to reset it and recycle it.
• Humane AI Pin, 2025. HP bought what was left of Humane, and at noon Pacific on February 28, 2025, the servers went off. A device that sold for between $499 and $699 couldn't do anything without them.
• Neato robot vacuums, 2025. Neato closed in 2023 and its parent company, Vorwerk, promised to keep the cloud running for years. On October 6, 2025 it shut it down, about three years early. No app control, no schedules, no maps. The vacuums still run if you walk over and press the button.
• Nest Learning Thermostat, first and second generation, 2025. On October 25, 2025, Google cut them off from the Nest and Home apps. They still hold a temperature on the wall, but nobody can check on them from away, change them remotely, or get a notification from them. In a second home that's the whole point of having one.
• Belkin Wemo, 2026. Wemo's cloud and app ended on January 31, 2026. Plugs and switches that had been set up through Apple's HomeKit, or that used Thread, kept working. Everything else lost its smarts.

What survived, and why

Read the list again for the parts that kept working. The Iris sensors that spoke Zigbee and Z-Wave. The Wemo switches that had been set up in HomeKit or ran on Thread. The Nest thermostat's schedule, which lives in the thermostat. The Neato's start button.

Every survivor had its brain in the house. Everything that died needed a server somewhere else to make a decision for it.

That's the whole lesson, and it's not a new one. A house that needs someone else's computer to work is renting its intelligence, and the landlord can sell the building.

What I do about it

The houses we build run themselves. The rules that close the water main, hold the heat, and turn on the lights run on hardware in the house, which the owner owns, talking to devices on the house's own network. We don't put in devices that need their maker's cloud to work day to day, and when a good device insists on one, we rebuild it so it doesn't.

LMI is a company too, and I'd be a hypocrite not to say so. So we planned for the day we're the one on this list. Every LMI house keeps a current description of itself (every room, device, and rule), and that, along with the source code for everything we build, goes into escrow, to be released to the owner if we ever stop. The house keeps running without us in the meantime. You'd lose us. You wouldn't lose the house.

Before you buy the next smart thing, ask one question: if the company that made this disappeared tomorrow, what would still work?

If the answer is "nothing," you aren't buying a device. You're buying a subscription to one, whatever the receipt says.