Many of us use a litany of smart home devices, even if we wouldn't typically qualify them as being smart home devices. These include the likes of an Amazon Echo or Google Nest Hub, yet there are countless others, too. Smart plugs, smart lights, and other small devices like these can be incredibly useful, but while you wouldn't think of it, many of these devices can essentially be remotely deactivated with very little notice. Just ask a Google Nest Thermostat owner: your expensive smart home devices might be a ticking time bomb.

Devices that phone home to a company and merely act as rented products rather than devices you actually own give smart homes a bad reputation for unreliability and privacy, and it's understandable why. Futurehome's entire debacle saw the company charge a subscription after devices were sold to users with an understanding that access was open-ended, and Logitech announced on October 8th that its $40 Pop switches were to be bricked October 15th, giving users a mere week of notice.

As time has gone on, we've begun to see more and more of these devices suddenly reach end of life, when no warning had been given at the point of sale that one day they would cease to work in the way you'd expect. It's planned obsolesence at that point, and serves to turn consumer devices into e-waste. Rest assured that Logitech has looked after its consumers at the very least, offering a 15% off coupon to consumers in the U.S. for some of its products. I say that tongue in cheek, of course.

Servers won't be kept alive forever

And we already have proof of it

Over the past few years, we've seen what happened to the first wave of online-capable devices, and it sends a pretty clear message. The original Xbox, Nintendo DS, and the Nintendo Wii, all had their official servers shut down in the 2010s, making it so that games that used the internet were no longer playable online. In the case of the Nintendo Wii, purchased content can still be redownloaded, and the same goes for the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS that came later. Yet new purchases were no longer possible, and Nintendo's page on redownloading older content for the Wii says that a shut down will happen eventually.

But that's gaming, how is that relevant? At the end of the day, it's all just servers, and companies sometimes upgrade older infrastructure, or want to save on the costs for legacy hardware. It doesn't matter what the servers are for, eventually a company will make a decision that the servers are no longer needed, or there aren't enough users to justify the expense, or they can simply save money and cut out that offering entirely.

In the case of Logitech's Pop switches, we don't really know what happened, but we know that in the Futurehome case, it seems to have been a cost-cutting measure. The original company went under and declared bankrupty, then 50% of the company was acquired by the original Futurehome team, and a paid subscription was brought in to continue using the products you had bought and paid for.

Is it reasonable to ask companies to keep servers up indefinitely? When does the definition of "reasonable" stretch to? Should companies be forced to relinquish control back to users when they decide that they're done supporting it? The "Stop Killing Games" movement essentially endeavored to achieve that goal, but specifically for games, and these are all tough questions to answer in a way that's fair to both the companies developing the products and the consumers who purchased them.

No matter what, one thing is undoubtedly unfair to consumers, and that's the status quo. Right now, companies can just retract their support a few years later. And there's nothing you can do about it, unless someone has figured out a way to locally control those devices.

What can you do about it?

Build your own, or support open hardware

If you have a device that you suspect will eventually get canned, you have a few options. And if you're looking to buy new smart home devices, then you have even more. We'll start with what to do with the devices you currently already have, and that involves evaluating the company that released it, when it was released, and what support has looked like. On top of that, look for that product online, and try to figure out if someone has already developed a way to locally control it. If they have, you can set that up, then block the device's internet access from there on in order to ensure your continued access.

For example, many Tuya devices can be cut off from the cloud entirely, or you can use a tool like Tuya Local to control them. Others, like Govee's products, have a built-in LAN API that allows you to control them locally, so you can cut them off from the internet and control them that way, too. Amazon, Google, and others don't usually allow for local control at all, and we've seen an example of where that would have made sense with the Nest Thermostat. It's a thermostat, it shouldn't need to rely on Google. But here we are.

If you're looking to buy your first devices, then you have significantly more options. Devices that don't require an internet connection are easy to find, and you can get smart lights that rely on a local-network hub, and the same goes for all other kinds of smart devices. They can be paired with the likes of Home Assistant or otherwise, and you can maintain control over them to deploy wherever and whenever you'd like.

Even for more complex projects, there are countless voice assistants you can run that will either run on your local network, or you can use with an external API, which means you're still not locked into a dependency as you can switch it whenever you need to. I've built a significant amount of my own sensors and smart home devices, and it's worth looking into to see if you can get away from a vendor locked-in ecosystem before you get started.

If you have a smart home with expensive, proprietary devices, then be warned: those devices could be ticking time bombs. And if those devices ever need to be replaced, look into the open and free alternatives first, rather than buying into an ecosystem where you may need to do the same thing in just a few years' time.