Nest 1st gen and 2nd gen thermostats no longer supported from Oct 25

The shameful part is that the only thing that even remotely (no pun intended) needs a server to even be online, is the out-of-home control, just for NAT traversal. It should be free to Google for these to have at least in-home smart functionality forever.

Well, that, and the moving target of updating an "app" every year for all the breaking changes Google and (especially) Apple do to the mobile OS. Although honestly I'd rather have a QR code that links you to a PWA hosted on the thermostat itself.

This should be pretty much true for every "connected" device out there. They should all have a mode that works by directly connecting over the local LAN. Why do device manufacturers refuse to support this configuration?

If I want to change the volume of my "smart speaker" from my phone that's also on my LAN, it shouldn't require a round trip to a server on the Internet, or an account with credentials, or any of that nutty stuff.

I’m affected by this, and as pissed at Google about it as anyone, but the headline is overblown. The old Nest devices continue to function as thermostats, and the on-device features like scheduling still work. But I need the cloud-based features (particularly remote control via the app), so I went ahead and paid the upgrade tax.

Setting schedules on the devices ain't bad as on some "dumb" thermostats, but it's a real pain in the ass.

It’s crazy that Sonos used to* have local wifi mesh networking and they decided “the cloud is better”.

* technically still does, but they tried to switch before they backpedaled

> Why do device manufacturers refuse to support this configuration?

My theory is that it checks boxes for "sEcUrItY."

There aren't enough enthusiasts who know the first thing about computers or security to be a market for any mass-market hardware, so they're designed for the proverbial "grandma" to be able to plausibly use. Therefore, you can't ask them to establish, remember, and maintain the secrecy of any credentials.

Therefore, they either need to make the devices permissively trusting on the LAN (which IoT devices got a lot of criticism for a few years ago) or they need these fluffy login methods that introduce dependencies: Usually they require email for forgotten-password recovery, SMS for a "sEcOnD fAcToR", and of course, because it would confuse people if the control only worked on the LAN without integrating into a home hub, they need every device to connect directly to the cloud and therefore for the app control to go through the WAN. Or at minimum, the LAN<->LAN communication is only permitted by possession of a JWT or similar that's been recently authorized by the cloud server.