Google announced the end of support for early Nest Thermostats in a support document earlier this year that largely flew under the radar. As of October 25, first and second generation units released in 2011 and 2012, respectively, will be unpaired and removed from the Google Nest or Google Home app.
Users will no longer be able to control their thermostats remotely via their smartphone, receive notifications, or change settings from a mobile device. End-of-support also disables third-party assistants and other cloud-based features including multi-device Eco mode and Nest Protect connectivity.
Dumb thermostats last for multiple decades.
Surprisingly, these still work as dumb thermostats after the cutoff date.
As do smart thermostats that don’t rely on the continued goodwill of any corporation to function.
Which ones are those?
Anything that supports HomeKit should work indefinitely. I have an ecobee4 that works great with Home Assistant via HomeKit.
Same with Matter. Home Assistant has a Matter module too. And, Matter is designed to be open!
My Honeywell one is not Internet connected, but it seems plenty smart. It knows the time and day, is programmable for four different periods each day, can handle all sorts of heating and cooling equipment. It also learns how long it takes to get your house to the right temp, then starts working before then to make it happen when the time arrives.
One of the apartments I lived in had a Honeywell wifi connected one that worked pretty well.
I saw the photo with a person for scale and I thought…why?
Z-wave thermostats don’t require Internet connectivity to function or control remotely. They do require something like Home Assistant for that remote control.
A simple open api could extend the life of these things by decades.
I think legally this suggestion makes you a pirate, a thief, a terrorist and a mass murderer.
I’m already on a bunch of lists. What’s a few more. I should collect them like steam cards.
Yup, this is what I just did. Replaced my two first generation Nests with Z-Wave Honeywells.
Uhh, isn’t this just turning them into dumb thermostats? It says you can’t control it via phone. Not that it stops working altogether.
I’ve got one of those with bi-metallic strips, it’s 35 years old, works no problem.
Joke’s on them, mine hasn’t been connected since about 2018. Works very well as just a thermostat
This isn’t “end of support.”
This is “loss of functionality.”
Totally inexcusable.
No it isn’t. I have one of these, the only loss of function is remote internet settings, which was a stupid feature. It was an escalator, it’s now become stairs. It still works fine as a thermostat, except Communist countries no longer know my house temperature.
Amazing how tech heads focus on minor shit like this with the long list of problems currently facing Fascist America.
I don’t say loss of ALL function.
You have lost functionality, sir. But people who overpaid for early Nest products have always been amazing at justifying their own purchases, so I’m not surprised you’re now minimizing this move.
Yeah. And even “loss of functionality” makes it sound passive; as if it just happened by accident. They Intentionally broke a working product.
Heh I guess this is my work self showing through. I’m a software developer and “loss of function” is a very severe term to me :D it’s only surpassed by loss of data, accessibility/legal issue, and security/privacy breach. On the less severe end we have loss of telemetry, degraded function (meaning there’s still a workaround) degraded performance, and finally cosmetic defect.
As most of our tech.
Being someone that yield to my tech stuff as long as possible I really love to live in a world where a company is forced to opensource everything related to a specific product if they opt to stop maintaining it.
Samsung did something similar with one of their tablets when they remotely removed an app that provided an IR remote function - a primary reason for my purchase. Samsung’s support not so politely told me, “Too fucking bad.” when I objected.
There was something I could do about it though. Even though a replacement 3rd party app was less than $5 I haven’t purchased another Samsung consumer product or service in almost a decade.
They were rude to you about it too? Jesus. I’m pleased to say I’ve never bought any Samsung product.
My father got and installed two of the newer nest thermostats, and they are bar none two of the most annoying tech devices I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to fix. Have literally spent hours debugging them when changing the wifi password, they don’t support wpa3, and the setup app feels like a half assed student project. I know this audience probably isn’t interested in getting one, but if one of your family members gets some for free, do NOT let them install them.
On the other hand, one can understand why Google doesn’t want to continue to pour resources into an ancient platform just to keep it on life support.
Bullshit. “Pour” my ass. Issue a legacy build of the app that controls them and walk away. What horseshit. This is shameful. The only reason it won’t blow up into a huge debacle is that these products targeted wealthy early-adopters in the first place and those folks can afford to upgrade, and most probably already have.
Absolutely fucking correct… You can maintain locks on my so-called smart devices for as long as you maintain your services… You want to pull the plug, you should be forced to open source and expose the tech so that we can keep it working on our own private servers. Proprietary tech is a bullshit excuse as well… The vast majority of these devices are about 10% of in house code riding on 90% of open standards, protocols, and packages. None of them are building the wheel from scratch.
For fucksake most of these devices could easily be implemented on decentralized architecture, if it wasn’t for all the pesky data mining they are doing
Except in the UK you can’t as they don’t sell them. They also ended UK support for their smoke detectors as well.
I switched to opentherm hardware and its now on my HA properly rather than via the cloud.
I did get a good ten years out the Nest hardware, I consider that reasonable for what it cost. Sure old fashioned controllers last longer, but i want the smart features
Glad I chose not to link my info to it to continue using the feature when Google took over.
This is exactly why I didn’t buy one of these or the Amazon version. I didn’t trust that the devices would work as long as they could function and was correct.
I bought one a bunch of years ago. Maybe 10 years. It worked fine. Did it’s thing. Then for no reason google chooses to kill it. Fool me once.
Then for no reason google chooses to kill it.
That’s kind of their thing.
I wondered how long it would take for that url to pop up. I will never ever rely on any Google product. Except maybe Gmail but I have an alternative plan should that go belly up.
What this list tells me is wait five years before trying any new Google product to see if they’re serious
What the list tells me is that if you do that, they might just kill it in year six anyways.
there is now, they probably want one with AI/spying controls.
I replaced mine with a Sensi. 4 months with Nest, and it decided to confuse hot vs cold signals. Middle of August, it tried to “cool” my house at 3am, instead turning on the furnace, and just kept on going due to the temperature rising. For a week straight, I awoke to 90 degree temps in my house at 3:30 to 4am, and a nice heating bill. I had an hvac friend come over ad tell me in fact, yep, it’s sending signal to furnace, not ac. He checked the wiring, all good. He admitted he knew little of Nests, but said only an idiot would design a thermostat that could allow for a hot/cold signal switch without rewiring.
Heat/cool wiring is rarely correct, many thermostats will have a software option to reverse the wiring.
Sucks that yours got reset for no good reason but it’s probably for the best
I mean, I’m not a trained tech, but it isn’t hard to open up the heat pump and look at wires going in and looking at the thermostat and making sure they match. Although I admit someone ran stranded wire instead of solid core (one day I might try to fish a new wire). For now I just tinned the ends.
There’s nothing wrong with stranded wire, it just means if it’s carrying voltage and a few strands snip or break (leading to greater than 15% voltage loss) it can cause issues. Solid is simply an all or nothing kind of wire. This is more of an issue though if you don’t get every stand under the terminal, otherwise it can be beneficial due to the fact that there is plenty more “wire” to name contact with each other in case a stand breaks in some way along the middle or not at either end. (Bearing being crushed, chewed, or other thing where the wires no longer make any contact with the rest of the wire)
The only thing I use solid core for is fire alarm systems (where all or nothing is crucial), certain audio equipments, and anything nearing high voltage which a thermostat generally doesn’t reach. If it does take 120v+ then wow what why.
Tinned tips though always help for sure, definitely makes it easier to remove/insert the wire.
Been a technician for the last 10 years now an thats my understanding of it atleast.
I have a Sensi and didn’t program it correctly, though my wiring was on point. HVAC guy puzzled over it a few then called me over to show me what the cryptic options meant. Been solid for a few years now.
I’d like to see those options in the app, but if those were included people would fuck them up and blame the company. 🤷🏻
I got 11 years out of mine. I had been wanting to upgrade it because it did not accept sensors.
Does it suck that it was still functional? Yup.
I mean they could just unlock the dang things at let some industrious hacker make them useful again. Hell I’d pay like $10 for a firmware that would work with home assistant.
I would have paid for that as well. I would pay for that for my truck’s infotainment center as well.
Honestly I’d pay as much as $50 to unlock my Microsoft sync to CarPlay on my old explorer.
I think car manufacturers that put closed systems in vehicles and then abandon them should be required to either open source the system or push a final update that adds Android auto/apple car play (or whatever they are called)
I wish I could upvote this 100 times
Something that might have been a result due to software laws after “stop killing games” initiative
Are API calls to the device signed or whatever? At a minimum one could snoop traffic to rev-eng the API, then recreate it on a lan-only segment
I haven’t snooped on the traffic but at the very least it was encrypted back to google. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also signed somehow.  If it was easy, somebody would’ve already cracked it, especially with all the brouhaha about them dropping support.
I’ve got one but I bought it from Nest, not Google. TBH I’m surprised it was supported this long, not in a thankful way but because Google is so anti consumer. I didn’t realize the app didn’t work until I saw this post. I’m glad to find out now, not during a heatwave where I’m trying to cool the house when I’m driving home.
This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.
The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.
The problem is, the real money is in either the data that it acquires or in recurring monthly costs.
Unfortunately, making a good, reliable product with no MRCs and no spying means fewer repeat buyers. Which is especially a problem for a niche community like selfhosters and privacy-conscious. You sell the product once and…that’s it. Eventually the market is full and some people are upgrading but now your product is selling on the secondary market.
This is business in the 21st century. They can’t survive without forced obsolescence, telemetry, and/or MRCs.
I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.
You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.
What’s an MRC?
Monthly recurring costs (i.e. some kind of subscription service)
There is an open source project to replace the innards:
No longer evil has released a firmware hack which redirects the nest to the no longer evil servers.
It works a treat and the web interface is slick.
There isn’t an app yet.
I did mine last night. Unfortunately I have already replaced my thermostat.
While an interesting idea, that project wants what amounts to the cost of a new thermostat in exchange for a kickstarter project. Might as well just buy a new thermostat.
Omg, a sustainable, repairable, and open source project costs the same as a closed source, non repairable, locked down option … Those are totally the same thing!
/S
Was hoping something like Homebridge could be used to still control these, but so far no luck. After the cutoff they can be used manually like a traditional thermostat, which is a surprise coming from Google. I still fear they are going to generate a bunch of ewaste from people replacing them.
Maybe time for home assistant to roll out their own thermostat made with esphome
With Google’s track record of jumping into a market and after they have millions of users shutting it down, I’m surprised they didn’t do this years ago.
How long before Honeywell does the same? The company spun off their residential services division (including thermostats) about 7 years ago and at first things were fine, but in the last couple of years the service has become increasingly unreliable. Their servers have gone down quite a few times and settings changes are sometimes delayed even when the servers are up.
Their Z-Wave thermostat is a nice upgrade without concerns about someone sitting in a corporate America e-suite deciding to pull the plug.
I bought mine before Google bought Nest, but I sure didn’t buy anything more from them after that.
If there was ever a better reason to set up Home Assistant if you want a smart home…
Jokes on them, I block my Nest from talking to the Internet so my electrical company cannot control the damned thing. They had control even after I opted out and Google insisted they unenrolled me in the energy savings plan. Don’t enroll in these plans [insert it’s a trap gif].
That “Smart Energy” discount has shown up in mailings for the last few years and I’ve considered signing up despite my general dislike of allowing any company more control of my life than they already have.
Why do you say they’re a trap? Did they change your thermostat settings far more than they claim or pull other BS you didn’t expect?
Smart Energy Discount issues from the personal view of a consumer.
These plans work by sending you notifications that they will be reducing your thermostat for you when there is an energy crunch.
Sounds good so far, here’s the issues I had:
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Let’s say you are a good consumer and let them change your thermostat to 85’F when it’s 100’F every single time… You saved… $5!!! and got to sweat profusely in your own home in the process.
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Let’s say you were working in the yard and come in sweaty and needing to cool off or you have a hot flash for some reason. If you change that thermostat while they are in control of it, you lose your whole $5 for not just that day, but the entire billing cycle.
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Let’s say you want to exit the plan. Now you’re on the hook to wait on hold with your energy company for hours waiting for the one department and probably one person who can unenroll you. Chances are likely even then that they can screw it up and like in my case, both Google and my southern California electrical company claim ignorance anything was done wrong yet keep me enrolled.
In short and in summary: It’s a trap because the savings is far, far too small for the sacrifice.
Thanks for that write-up. I’ll continue to ignore the electric company’s marketing efforts and remain blissfully disconnected.
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Release the specs so users can maintain them themselves.
