When the cloud goes dark

The June Oven still gets hot. You can walk up to it, tap the touchscreen, and roast a tray of vegetables like any other countertop oven. What's gone, since Weber shut off the app and cloud on September 22, is the stuff you actually paid extra for - remote control, the live camera view of your food cooking, software updates. Weber says it thought about open-sourcing the software and decided against it.

That was close to a $1,500 oven when it launched.

Belkin did the same thing to WeMo in January. Plugs, light switches, even a crockpot, all of them lost the app and their Alexa and Google voice control when the cloud went dark on the 31st. Unless you'd already paired yours with HomeKit, the best advice going around was to replace it.

I end up writing about this a lot. Every few months some company decides that its customers have had enough value for their purchase, and it always leaves me a little shocked. I should say up front that I work for Shelly, helping companies around the Americas integrate Shelly products into their offerings. However, I'm still a consumer. Shelly's local-first approach and its focus on privacy is what drew me to the brand before any of that, and I still use Shelly at home with my own family. Each day, for those companies, for consumers I connect with, or for my own house, I solve problems with Shelly, so whenever I step outside that world I'm hurt by how crappy most companies treat their customers.

It keeps happening because in most smart home products, the smart part lives on a server somebody else pays for. The day that bill stops making sense, your device gets dumber.

Shelly devices are built the other way around. Every one of them serves its own web interface, so you type its IP into a browser on your home network and get the full settings page. No account, no app, no server in between. If the Wi-Fi itself goes down, the device can put up its own access point and you connect to it directly.

Under that page sits an RPC API you can reach over plain HTTP, WebSockets, or MQTT on a broker you run yourself. One curl call to /rpc/Switch.Set flips a relay, and it's the same command language the devices use to talk to each other.

The automations live on the device too. Actions let one Shelly fire a webhook at another when an input changes, so a button by the front door can switch a relay on the other side of the house without a single packet leaving your network. On Gen2 and newer devices you can write JavaScript that runs right on the chip, reacting to events and reading Bluetooth sensors with nothing upstream. Then there are the 100+ integrations, many of them fully local, Home Assistant being the obvious one.

And the wall switch wired into a Shelly relay still turns on the light, because that input goes straight into the device. Your house keeps working even if every Internet server and network switch explodes and shuts down tomorrow.

A device you bought should keep doing its job for as long as the copper and silicon inside it hold up, not for as long as someone's server budget does.