Kevo app shutdown

[jakedata]

"ends support for smartphone enabled"...

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.

[theamk]

it's worse than that - those locks are bluetooth-based, so they don't care about the cloud.

What happened is that they are disabling the app, so it is no longer usable.

[com2kid]

My Lockly lock supports a complete offline setup, no phone required to register finger prints or setup PIN codes. I believe I can even turn off the BT completely if I so desire.

It is just exactly smart enough for my liking.

[mingus88]

It depends. According to the link this lock was supported for over ten years, and the landscape for this type of device was pretty Wild West back then. There are a lot of devices that never even got that much support.

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.

[z3ugma]

Ugh, I'm so incensed. This is the 2nd IOT product in my home getting bricked within 2 months.

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...

[Mistletoe]

Thank you for this. Our 2nd gen Nest is our pride and joy and Google has done nothing but trash it continually.

[Barbing]

Thank you for keeping good stuff out of landfills!

[btreecat]

Honestly I found the "smart" parts of my nest to be pointless once I connected it to HA.

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.

[leakycap]

> "After more than a decade of service .... users can no longer open/close or manage their door lock via the mobile app or web portal."

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?

[Moto7451]

As an owner of a few of those smart plugs I can attest they didn’t work properly when supported. You could get them paired in matter but they just fall off the network and never come back until you did a full reset.

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.

[gblargg]

The cost of keeping the outlets working was more than their calculated user dissatisfaction cost.

[userbinator]

Meanwhile, there are countless century-old (or even more) dumb locks in regular use, and they will continue to function even when some apocalyptic event destroys all infrastructure.

[swiftcoder]

At least with the wemo there is fairly decent 3rd-party support at this point...

[uptown]

They just couldn’t refrain from the self-congratulatory bullshit.

[baobun]

2 months notice is very short, especially considering some of these will have been deployed for a decade... A year or so would have been expected.

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.

[gblargg]

If you don't have the physical key available to you outside your house, you failed to have a backup option for the inevitable failure of the electronics.

[esseph]

Meh, nothing a drill with a decent bit won't fix

[ashayh]

Buy locally configurable stuff only.

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.

[cortesoft]

This is fine for the HackerNews crowd, but most people aren’t going to have the skills and/or time to run a local setup, and it’s not unreasonable for them to want smart lock functionality.

[neilv]

They try to sell you replacement product in the same announcement:

> 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...)

[dmitrygr]

Turns out that the “S” in “IoT” stands not only for “security” but also for “support”.

[h4ch1]

I'd recommend everyone who buys IoT devices first search if the device is jailbreak-able and/or guides exist that enable you to load homebrew software/control it with open source alternatives.

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.

[Negitivefrags]

This annoys me greatly.

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.

[molticrystal]

Maybe cut the wires from the current circuit board(s) and throw in a ESP32 with wifi and bluetooth and driver board for the servos.

[sixothree]

My Schlage uses a numeric entry and has no connectivity whatsoever. I love everything about it.

[numbsafari]

Don’t buy anything from Assa Abloy, local or not.

[quitit]

Rather barefaced to squeeze in a sales pitch to an End-of-life notice. "Let us slap you again the future!"

Seems like the right time to switch to an offering that can't be so easily trashed.

[kevincox]

Yeah, at first I thought they were going to provide a free replacement. But no, just asking for more money from the people they just pissed off.

[komali2]

I never understood the smart lock. Some other connected appliances make sense - HVAC for example. But unlocking my door with a key is such a trivially easy, failure-proof thing to do, and every smart lock I've ever seen so riddled with failure modes, that it boggles my mind anyone would go through the cost and effort to install.

[542354234235]

I've had a key break in a deadbolt lock before. I can go running without carrying keys. I can assign a temp code to my pet sitter/handyman/whoever without having to police up keys or worry about keys being copied. I know when and which code is used, in case of an incident (none so far). My partner has lost 3 mailbox keys and zero house keys (since there is no house key). My door auto locks, and forgetting to lock your door is one of the biggest security risks, since crimes of opportunity are so much more common than targeted crimes. I've given my neighbor access during an emergency while we were out of the country. I can pre unlock my door from my smart watch if my hands are going to be full. I absolutely think the cost and effort were worth it for me.

[jondwillis]

Tell that to the broken key stuck in my door that I have been too lazy to pry out.

[CamperBob2]

AirBnB rentals are common (but annoying) applications for these.

[function_seven]

I love walking up to my front door and having it automatically unlock when I’m carrying groceries.

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.

[syntaxing]

I honestly think mandatory local support for HomeKit standard is one of the best designs. I lost internet despite having power due to a city wide outage. Having HomeKit still work for smart lights and outlet + home assistant was awesome. Pretty much anything HomeKit supported will last “perpetually” for its smart features.

[molticrystal]

Europe petitioned for a Don't Kill Games initiative, while I support it whole heartily, this seems like something that is a bit more important and would fit right in with that movement.

[crooked-v]

Also Matter/Thread, which is effectively the successor to platform-specific protocols like Homekit for local-only stuff.

[moepstar]

> Pretty much anything HomeKit supported will last “perpetually” for its smart features.

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.

[wg0]

I worry about TP-Link bulbs and cameras. Some legislation is required.

Regulations aren't as bad.

[ranger_danger]

> Some legislation is required

Is it not enough to simply let the people decide who they want to do business with? I'm genuinely curious.

[mahrain]

There really are too few business models available to build sustainable IoT solutions, apart from subscriptions (and only Security companies seem to have figured this out), pyramid schemes (letting your new users pay for maintaining the whole solution), or plain old planned obsolescence (with forced upgrades, like with Smartphones).

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.

[quitit]

Folks in corporate thought users would just love a garbage spyware app that reproduces functionality already available under the various home automation platforms - but with extra steps and pointless online requirements.

Then corporate finally realises that years of "user 000128571 locked door" log files are worth precisely f'all to advertisers.

[ekianjo]

Don't buy connected stuff is a lesson people still need to learn

[bhhaskin]

Connected stuff is fine, but who owns the connection matters.

[wilg]

Not really, they shut it down and basically now it's just not a connected thing. "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs."

[wpm]

I remember a year or two ago the FCC was here in the comments asking people about IoT and what we felt the issues were.

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.

[recursivedoubts]

Internet of Bricks

[burnt-resistor]

Of shitty self-shitting bricks

[VladVladikoff]

Sort of surprising that the app is cloud based rather than Bluetooth. You would expect a Bluetooth lock to keep working even if the cloud infrastructure was offline. And if the locks are only wifi, doesn’t that mean they would go through batteries like crazy? How long can a battery powered smart lock stay online?

[bri3d]

They’re Bluetooth based and worked offline, but like so many “cloud” products, the app required an account which it seems to use to provision the key material for Bluetooth. I’m assuming they’re shutting down the account servers - so depending on how long the app goes between logins (or if the key material expires or not), it may be possible to extend their use.

This would be a fun reverse engineering project, probably!

[reactordev]

And lose the ability to data mine and show you ads while you try to get into your own home, fat chance…

[kalleboo]

From a quick look, these are still being sold new on Amazon (by third-party sellers)

[brian-armstrong]

Sorry for the convenience

[baggachipz]

"We're killing the product you bought! Here, buy another product from us!"

...And Lucy pulls the football once again.

[chrisallick]

lol "probably just use a key."

[grebc]

Sounds to obvious and reasonable.

[newobj]

buy stupid devices win stupid prizes

[abtinf]

This is where proper Apple Home accessories shine. No need for apps to configure them or to use them.

[wilg]

The only problem is that Apple Home, Siri, and all related frameworks and APIs barely work. (I also have my entire Home on Apple Home. They've done an awful job!)