Google's Nest Stops Selling Smart Smoke Alarms Over Fire Safety Concerns

&gt; &quot;Nest can remotely disable the Wave feature&quot;<p>How can I be 100 % sure that the &quot;just beep when smoke&quot; feature can&#x27;t be remotely disabled without my notice?<p>Intelligent home appliances are nice and all, but when the lives of your family depend on it, I&#x27;d rather be on the KISS side.

<p><pre><code> Nest has stopped selling its smart smoke alarms after it discovered a flaw which could prevent the timely detection of fire. the company is not aware of any customers who have experienced it </code></pre> this is disingenuous. you would expect this feature (detect fire and save your life) to be used by a tiny, tiny percentage of customers. the fact that nobody&#x27;s experienced the failure does not make this situation any better.<p>it&#x27;s like selling a car with a broken airbag. &quot;well, it&#x27;s not caused me a problem, I don&#x27;t see the issue ...&quot;<p>(I&#x27;m not criticising Nest, they&#x27;re doing the right thing. I&#x27;m saying it&#x27;s bad journalism to throw that in the article as if that mitigates things)

I felt smoke alarm was un-natural product for Nest, but again they were the men in arena and its their company - much respect there. I was anticipating something like a device that lets timing for water heater and calibrate the temperature etc. but I guess there are just too much variety of water heater systems for that, but it would be cool and reduce gas bill and in a true nest fashion would pay_for_itself.<p>But this device also show-cases how bringing &quot;smartness&quot; into safety devices is fraught with risk and in the case smoke detector the convenience is not worth the economics. The Nest thermostat was true win-win value proposition - where as the Smoke detector is just not that.

That&#x27;s very responsible of them. Even if it means lost sales, it seems a right thing to do, and may ultimately give them a good PR.

Is there any more information on what exactly the problem was? From the article it is unclear if this is a pure software bug, a UI problem, or something else.

Question: If this was a simple fix (disabling Wave) for a convenience feature (waving instead of having to reach and hit a button), then why are they stopping sales? It would seem logical to update all unsold devices to disable Wave and continue on with sales.<p>Safety concern, slightly. Nest has made note that this feature have never been compromised yet (then again, its the one time when the Wave does fail that caused a huge issue so this point is null). Also, the Wave feature does not affect the detection of smoke, only the resulting alarm.<p>I think there is something else going on here. Possibly a more serious safety hazard. If a software update can solve the Wave issue, then why the stopped sales? If there are stopped sales, why not a more serious email&#x2F;note or a recall?

Aww that&#x27;s sad. What I liked about the Nest smoke alarm was that I could check which of my various houses was on fire, right from my smartphone. Ugh, guess will have to wait for version 2.0.

<i>sigh</i> I just ordered one of these and was really looking forward to it :(<p>As a safety device, it&#x27;s a no brainer - I have to return it until it&#x27;s rock solid. I can&#x27;t knowingly replace my existing smoke detector with one which has the potential to under perform.

Now this is a good April Fools joke (albeit a little late)