That's a good question - and I'm not sure.

I created my app when I had a Nest thermostat and was working from home. The thermostat would assume that no-one was at home during the day - and so turn off the heating - as I didn't walk past it often enough, so the original purpose of the app was just to detect when I was actively using my PC, and ping the thermostat not to go into "Away" mode.

It was then really rewarding to add more features and make the app available for others to use. I got some lovely feedback and sensible feature requests via email, and one user generously did a French translation of the UI. I even got a small number of $€£s in Paypal donations!

However. I no longer have a Nest thermostat (moved to Australia, where they're not available), no longer work from home, and now have a young son. So I have to admit that prioritising the time & finding the motivation to rework the app to work against a different set of APIs (if even possible) may be hard to come by.

Because having an open API fosters a community of applications that is free marketing and free development for your product.

Nest products are expensive, those 1800 users may equate to a few hundred thousand in revenue for Google, who may instead buy a competitor for their next purchase.

Developer hours going towards enriching the ecosystem at no cost to Google are gold. They’ve now alienated this dev, and produced yet another cautionary tale for anyone thinking about relying on Google.

He's not going to be the only one with a few thousand users.

What exactly qualifies as a user? Are API users individual accounts making transactions? Are they companies that have registered with Google to use the Works with Nest API?

If it's 1800 individual hobbyists I get it, but if we're talking about 1800 small and medium businesses that have to find a different way to support their customer base that's a huge problem.

What are you playing devils advocate against? OP wasn't saying it was a bad business decision by google, he was just saying it sucks for the 1800 people using his thing.

Are you saying those 1800 people can't be upset about the lost functionality because they don't effect Google's bottom line?

I don't understand how your comment follows from the GP

1800 is big number. When you piss off these many people, they talk, they let their friends know, they tweet. It's a world of instant information that spreads like wild fire. You are easily talking about turning away 18000 or even million users depending on who picks up their frustration. You are one journalist away from disaster. So if you got to piss off these many people, you better have real good reason and be able to explain it convincingly. You show empathy. You have path for switch. You give enough of notice. I see none of that in Google's blog post. Absolutely none. They have hired people who simply don't care or perhaps are so dumb that they don't even know the damage they are doing. Next time when Google guy show up at interview, make sure to ask him/her big decisions he/she made about product shutdowns and how they executed on them.

> Why should they care?

Because they're still users, and that's only for this app; there are a lot more Nest users than that. How Google treats them is a sign of how they may treat other users in the future. If Google make it a habit to screw users, users will not trust Google in the future. Losing the trust of your users is more expensive than some companies seem to realise.