This should surprise absolutely no one. After the way Google utterly fucked its Revolv customers who'd sunk hundreds if not thousands of dollars into suddenly-useless hardware, you can rest assured Google will happily shut down any product or feature the very instant it stops making money. They have no legal obligation to not behave reprehensibly so that's just what they'll do.
All IoT hardware should have completely open APIs and have the cloud involved <i>only</i> as a value-add. If you really must collect analytics data on my fans, fine.. ugh.. I guess. But don't leave me hanging if you decide you don't want to support my device anymore.
> IoT was supposed to bring about this wonderful new era of integrated devices in the smart home. Instead, we now have walled gardens of stuff running in their own isolated ecosystems<p>Was that really the expected outcome of a smart home? I always assumed that there would be a few walled gardens, and you’d have to pick which garden you wanted your house to be in.
> The end result of this? If I decide to accept Google's offer to migrate my Nest account to Google Assistant, the part of the Haiku app which integrates the fan and the Nest controls will stop working. The fans themselves will also stop communicating with the Works With Nest APIs and the Smart Cooling mode will cease functioning.<p>Is this not precisely the sort of hogwash that prompted RMS to found the FSF?<p>Capitalism is good, but it's predicated upon the concept if competition.<p>As with paper ballots, we really need to awaken to the concept that there is more than one dimension--efficiency--to many of life's challenges.
It is an education issue (that will hopefully solve itself) that people still buy hardware (or software) the functionality of which entirely depends on some uncontrollable (and often dubious) entity.
Bold-faced*<p>> Although many people seem to believe that “barefaced lie” is the source of both the “bald” and “bold” versions, it appears that “bold-faced lie” is by far the oldest, dating back to at least the early 1600s.