Google to end support for OnHub routers in 2022
support.google.com
support.google.com
Reviewers and experts called this out at the time, but Google reassured that onhub will not face any issues since they will commit to long term support of the device. As a testament to that they highlighted the overspecification of the device (it had enormous ram and cpu overhead) that would allow it to continuously improve.
This is a "feature", and is working as intended: https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1294819896019189761
Don't buy Google home networking equipment.
That response is a little confusing: the management app is Internet only, but it doesn't drop all its routing tables or something just because the uplink is gone. Moreover, the regular DHCP and so on will operate just fine while not connected to the internet.
I don't know what happened in your case and I totally agree that it's a bad experience for troubleshooting (the thing even has some weird API on it [1], so why isn't there some basic web-based management tool), but you can absolutely unplug the uplink and packets flow locally.
Luckily I had a ~15 year old Cisco router I could temporarily replace it with.
No non-disposable hardware should ever depend on a phone app, lest it become equally disposable.
All my electronics and computers from the 80s and 90s run just fine today! In great part because they don't depend on anything.
Electronics from the 2020s are unlikely to be usable in the 2060s simply due to unnecessary dependencies, even if the hardware itself is totally fine. Don't buy things like that.
Yeah, I won't touch anything that doesn't have basic controls as physical.
I know some people who didn't jump onto Airports because of this. If this is important to you, avoid Amazon's eero line, as well.
Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enough to buy a new device from them like this. It is like 'bite me once, bite me again please.'.
'eh, we just self destroyed your device, because, fuck you, but here is a coupon to buy a new one from us that we will also kill in a few years' ...
Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s).
Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.
That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app.
And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
Your mileage may vary.
That said though when they work I got pretty much the rated speeds all the time without any intermediate dropouts or other issues. Stupid simple to use, just plug both sides in and suddenly network. This was sometimes even without both units being on the same circuit, but at least one of the legs had a decently short run to the electrical panel.
You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable.
Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.
802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.
802.11ax on its own does nothing to address the problem of wasting too much airtime serving a client at the extreme edge of your AP's range where neither 802.11ax or ac transmission rates will work. That kind of problem must be tackled with better QoS strategies that are not inherently tied to any particular generation of the WiFi standards, but in practice can only be developed and tested for chipsets that are sufficiently hackable
I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had.
I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything.
We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.
How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences.
The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.
Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.
For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.
BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…
Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.
What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?
We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.
My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.
PM 2.5 may be in the range of a couple micrograms/m³ in one room (with air purification) and 100× that in the other adjacent room, so it makes sense to have sensors everywhere.
Still very far from 50, though.
Lightbulbs not so much.
The only thing I wish it would do would have better multi-zone temperature and humidity sensing to know to turn on the circulation fan when the edges of the house get too hot/cold compared to where the thermostat is. Even then that doesn't require the internet, it could be done with cheap 433MHz temp/humidity probes running on button cell batteries for years.
Or to respond to the weather (e.g. start warming the house earlier coz it's a particularly cold day).
If your life is very strictly regimented maybe it's less useful.
This doesnt mean I want a cloud connected thermostat. I want something that talks to homeassistant.
Respond to the weather? Its a thermostat. Even a decent bi-metallic strip thermostat will "respond to the weather". Its not like the thermostat needs to do anything different if its an especially cold day outside, it will keep the indoor environment as you programmed it. How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?
The only "respond to the weather" idea I'd like would be to account for especially humid days as sometimes the temperature is fine but its really humid in the house. But once again it doesn't need to reach out to an API to figure out the humidity outside at some airport 20mi away, it just needs a local humidity sensor.
I find it weird that you get indignant at the idea of a little more automation than a timer.
>How do you think thermostats worked before the internet?
Either wasting money heating an empty home when I went out or I came home to a cold house and then turned on the heating. I remember.
I also remember thermostats which didnt understand the concept of weekends, etc.
I agree, which is why I use a multi-stage programmable thermostat. Once again, it turns off when I leave, turns back on a bit before I get home, lets it warm/cool a bit while I sleep, and then starts back up around when I wake up.
> I find it weird that you get indignant at the idea of a little more automation than a timer.
If you're manually telling it you're on your way home that sounds like less automation to me. Personally I'd take the tiny bit of efficiency hit having it heat the house maybe an hour or two off from my regular schedule than having to micro-manage turning my thermostat on and off on a more expensive device that will probably be eventually bricked.
I'm just saying, the vast majority of the quality of life improvement from your internet connected thermostat could have been achieved with just a 7-day 4-stage programmable thermostat that has existed for 20 years. Its nice you're happy with your expensive device that's beholden to some cloud server, I hope it stays online for a few more years.
lol I guess you made a bad guess about what homeassistant does or you simply chose not to read what i wrote.
Either way it's nice that you won the argument against the straw man you argued with.
It being beholden to a cloud server is only half of my point which is the vast majority of the key functionality you talked about could have been achieved with a far simpler and cheaper device that has absolutely no network connectivity at all. Sure, you wouldn't be able to datamine exactly when your thermostat kicked on or off, but to me pressing a button to tell it you're coming home is less automation than your home just automatically being at the temp you want when you're there. If your schedule fluctuates by several hours every day for when you wake, when you leave, when you come home, and when you sleep I guess it could be useful to reprogram that on the fly remotely but for the vast majority of people a 7 day 4 stage programmable is fine. Not everything in my house needs to have an IP address.
Also you have to take into account that you pay but not have 2 working devices in the end (old and new). Just one.
Sure, if the new one was providing significant value, there could have been an interest. Like if you network was saturated. But that would be surprising because currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers are more than enough for most households usage.
Also, what is interesting is the Stockholm syndrom: some comments here are saying that it was probably old enough to be changed, so not so bad. But in that case, did you think about that, that you would probably have to change your router for a new one before receiving the obsolescence notice from Google?
802.11ac was released in 2014, only 7 years ago. You wouldn't have a 10 year old AC router, and really probably wouldn't have an 8 year old AC router quite yet.
They at least do this for their Pixel phones.
When I replaced my 2016 OnHub + Google WiFi mesh with an Eero WiFi 6 system, I saw across the board improvements in latency and bandwidth from almost every client (faster ones more than doubled). We also lost the sporadic hangs for iOS devices which Google never fixed for totally innocent reasons.
Everyone is able to make their own determination on that sort of thing, when they should upgrade. Or at least they used to be able to do that for this product class. Google is now baking in expiration dates that aren't even published at the time of purchase.
The other thing to consider is how the rest of the market compares: a lot of people have routers which still work but are no longer secure, so this entire field seems right for a legal requirement of, say, a decade support period and/or mandatory recycling.
$0.50/day seems like a small thing until you're strapped for cash but all of a sudden have to pay $500 all at once to replace your Google mesh network hardware.
That aside, as much as this particular example frustrates me, it's not my primary concern: It's the overall trend of forced obsolescence taking yet another step forward and increasing issue of e-waste.
Mandatory recycling is also problematic. It could mean that products that might have ample community support (e.g., via OpenWRT) would still be illegal, and in general would take away a user's right to support & maintain their purchases. It is also something that would be ripe for regulatory capture.
Separate from those issues is the consumer's ability to make an informed choice: A product with a potential expiration date should be required to market it as such. Google does this with Pixel phones; hopefully after this they will begin doing it with their other products as well, and I think that in general it should be required: MS does this with Windows, plenty of other vendors do it, there's no reason it can't be a universal requirement as part of consumer protection laws.
You're using a definition of “all of a sudden” meaning “at some point within the next year or so”? Think about how much the average person will spend on their ISP bill in that same timeframe — again, I don't think this is great but it doesn't seem that dramatically different from, say, what happens when you have to replace your router in a hurry because Linksys orphaned it and your ISP is going to yank access due to an unpatched vulnerability.
> Mandatory recycling is also problematic. It could mean that products that might have ample community support (e.g., via OpenWRT) would still be illegal, and in general would take away a user's right to support & maintain their purchases.
I think you misunderstood the concept: requiring the manufacturer or reseller to recycle products which would otherwise end up in a landfill when people don't want them any more wouldn't in any way force the owner to turn over a device they want to keep. More importantly, building incentive structures around this would do something about the 99.995% of devices which were never going to get community firmware support.
Similarly, I doubt simply advertising expiration dates would have changed this: Google never said they were offering lifetime support for OnHub and very few people would expect them to offer support massively longer than the rest of the field when things like the WiFi standards improve more frequently than that. If they'd said “7 years of support”, I doubt it would have changed many decisions.
That is a fair point, assuming a person knows about the EOL. The article for this is "Support for OnHub routers ending in 2022". If that is the same email subject Google uses for email outreach (assuming they go that far) then it's something that many users would simply ignore, especially since the majority are nowhere near as security conscious as people here in the HN community. So I think there is potential for a sizeable % of owner to have "sudden" expenses.
your ISP is going to yank access due to an unpatched vulnerability.
If it's hardware I get through my ISP then they replace it. If it's not hardware from my ISP, how would they even know? I'm not sure that an uplink from the cable model to WiFi router will give them that info. And even if it did, they'd have no idea if I had simply slapped OpenWRT on the router negating the EOL issues.
I think you misunderstood the concept:
I'm talking about the people who would still want the device. Maybe a small portion, admittedly. My bigger concert is the moral hazard presented by giving OEM's an incentive to have ever shorter & shorter support windows. Just look at the CPU req's for Windows 11: Many millions of pre-8th gen Intel chips have the horsepower to run Windows 11. Just imagine how awful it would be if every system with an older chip had to be tossed in the trash.
Google never said they were offering lifetime support for OnHub and very few people would expect them to offer
That's a reasonable point. But in the vast majority of cases "support has ended" does not mean "your device is now (nearly) useless.".
For things like ongoing patches & similar maintenance, I understand that it can't reasonably go on forever. I do believe that vendors should have to publish their support horizons though. I'm not sure why you don't think this would help: It would tell users upfront, given that more & more of Google's products rely on their cloud support, when it will become a brick. I'm sure that folks who bought an OnHub 3 months ago would have appreciated knowing it would barely last a year.
With the Pixel this provides customers with a very useful piece of information when making a purchase decision. I know I take it into consideration: I just had to upgrade (dropped my phone-- no more crappy minimal cases for me now) and their support horizon was a factor in determining whether I went for a 5a or paid a little extra for a 6. (I chose the 6... better spec's, but I liked the style more too. :) )
So, I think expiration dates-- especially if more prominently displayed than with Pixel phones: think big bold Letters on initial config & an email where the use has to actively confirm receipt... some people will ignore and just click through, but they had their chance so long as Google doesn't bury it in a wall of text.
Still, your point about security vulnerabilities is well-taken. If there was to be any mandatory recycling, it would need be a very generous timeframe. It would be somewhat unique for consumer products, but safety limits on usable lifetime for equipment exist in various industries. I would want regulations to approach the topic with extreme caution though to at least minimize vendor influence.
The key thing to remember is that there’s considerable variability across different peoples’ experience. If you live in a widely spaced suburban house, you probably don’t need to worry about interference the way an apartment dweller does or even someone in a city where the neighbor’s property starts a lot closer. The layout and materials used in your house similarly have a big impact on whether your devices are operating on 5GHz close to a base station or 2.4GHz further away.
Since you have your latency sensitive devices on Ethernet, you probably are fine with an old AP. Cables are definitely better but not everyone has permission or a suitable way to run them (my house built in the 1930s did not include spare conduit).
I'm not recommending Ubiquiti specifically given recent events but just using it as an example of a prosumer brand, even a few years old now and it still gets firmware updates, where as my old consumer router would be lucky to get any updates at all.
Unless you enjoy networking as a hobby, I would worry with that strategy that there is a sizeable risk of wasting your time with unreliable devices, with ongoing maintenance work, or having to rework your network in a few years.
My current solution is to buy Unifi UAP-AC-LR (~120USD) and configure it as an access point using the “Unifi Network” app from my phone, and hopefully never touch it again. I have done this at friends, and fixed their WiFi woes, without requiring much of my time (occasional complaints that the WiFi isn’t working, but not due to the device*, just ISP or router issues). Easy to plug the AP into a new router if you change ISP or move houses.
* Well, one device just stopped working with a hardware fault: I think due to being installed in a very hot area. I haven’t had software issues or flakiness. Flakiness is my previous experience of prosumer devices and what I most want to avoid.
Do they have a unifi version that I can plug in to a wall outlet without having to upgrade everything to PoE too?
Unless you have PoE you can't add a unifi AP for $120 USD. And getting into PoE isn't cheap.
https://store.ui.com/products/u-poe-af
If someone is willing to spend a bit more, the 8 port managed GbE switch with 4 PoE ports is $110: https://store.ui.com/products/unifi-switch-8-60w
That said, they’re coming out with a “UniFi Dream Router” for $80 (might be more once it goes GA, it’s in beta now via their Early Access program) that has the wifi, gateway, and management all in one device https://dongknows.com/ubiquitis-wi-fi-6-unifi-dream-router-u...
If someone is interested in going all-in on UniFi, their best solution is coming in the form of the Dream Machine Pro SE that can support their camera platform (Protect) along with Network and includes a 10Gb SFP+, 2.5GbE, and a PoE 8-port switch which should be fine for most houses (e.g. 5 wired PoE cameras + 3 PoE APs).
I’ve been into Ubiquiti ever since the OG EdgeRouter, so my current setup is a bit more complex. I’m not happy that they’ve ended support for UniFi Video that I ran for years on a NUC with Ubuntu that also hosts other small home automation stuff and Jenkins. I finally caved and got a Cloud Key 2+ to run Protect, which only runs on their hardware, even though it’s just 64-but ARM. At least it’s fast, I guess. It would be great if they had any real competition in this space, but all the other DIY and enterprise options really suck for cameras. MikroTik is fine for networking gear, and with the prices I’ve been seeing on some wifi mesh systems and even “gaming” routers, people could be getting Aruba Instant On or Ruckus Unleashed systems that would be infinitely better than the junk that they’re passing off as “gaming” routers these days.
Investigators say they were able to tie the downloads to Sharp and his work-issued laptop because his Internet connection briefly failed on several occasions while he was downloading the Ubiquiti data. Those outages were enough to prevent Sharp’s Surfshark VPN connection from functioning properly [0]
Yeah, surfashark takes an extra few minutes to load after you start your machine. Maybe he got over eager. I wonder if he has a good lawsuit case for this "Your honor, I was trying to do crime but the failure of the defendant's product resulted in a life-ruining indictment"
[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/12/ubiquiti-developer-charg...
You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
For you maybe.
I think it is nothing like enough. My guitar amplifier is about twenty years old.
My house is thirty and will probably make it to 300 (climate catastrophes wiling)
I do not buy Google products, if I did I would stop.
This whole wireless internet thing is pretty recent and is getting increasingly better every year.
As long as I can work, play 2 concurrent movies while having videocalls at the same time, I don't see the point upgrading just for the sake of upgrading. Unless the security of my devices is at risk.
Are people really replacing their home network infrastructure every 5 years?
Unless you’re living out in the wild with no devices to interfere, speed and reliability will be well worth the effort and save a lot on ineffective Wi-Fi gear.
If a network-attached device is always in one place and it has an ethernet port, it has a cable.
If it's always in one place and it doesn't have an ethernet port, there's a cable to the wireless point in that room or the next.
5-port gigabit switches are about $20 each. A 12-port gigabit switch anchors the whole thing. None of them take configuration.
This is harder but not impossible for people who live in apartments; white cable run along the edge of the ceiling or along the foot of the wall is a good bet.
The upside here is adding Ethernet has been very low cost for me: Literally the cost of the cable and the keystones. Downside is I've been here like two years and my Ethernet runs are still somewhat random/piecemeal.
In one case, which has performed surprisingly well for basically the whole two years: I used an existing coax run with a pair of Motorola MoCA adapters, which provides a gigabit connection from my basement to a room that's particularly hard to retrofit a connection to.
Wi-Fi is for guests and smartphones. Ethernet is for life.
Can't recommend this enough. WiFi is great for mobility but it's just not that reliable. For anything that doesn't have to be moving, pull some ethernet to it and be happy for the long haul.
It seems this is more common than it should be. Apple users who complain of new products lacking features older products had, but who continue to buy those products come to mind.
And I look at compatibility matrix before buying it.
This strategy has worked very well. I upgrade on my terms.
I agree in the abstract, but I've seen enough devices ship OTA updates that make switching harder that I prefer to just cut over ASAP these days. (This is a general approach, not just for network gear; same as how I unlock my phone bootloaders right out of the box so I don't have to deal with data wiping)
Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3MpGmk
Some people don't care for Realtek nics, you can spend more to get Intel if you want. You could put more ram, or storage, or whatever if you're going to do more than routing. Ryzen might be nicer, but they don't have a cheap CPU with integrated graphics right now, and it's not worth paying $100 more to get one for a router, IMHO. If you can find a motherboard with IPMI for cheap, that'd be nice, but I can't, so I just use a spare monitor and keyboard when I need to.
There's small x86 router boards around, and they're cool, but if anything goes wrong, your options are limited. If anything in this fails, you can get the part replaced at your local computer store, even if that's BestBuy.
> "After that, your router will still work, but it will not receive any new software features or security updates, and performance cannot be guaranteed. You will not be able to use any Google Home app features to do things like update network settings, add devices, or run speed tests. And Google Assistant commands like “Hey Google, pause my Wi-Fi” will also not be available." [0]
It'll work, but you won't be able to control it in any way!
0 - From the email I received telling me support was ending
> Since OnHub routers were introduced 6 years ago, a lot has changed. In 2022, support for these older devices will end.
Given the devices were over spec'ed to allow for future expansion I highly doubt they're outdated already.
<dissolve/fade to flashback>
The team was "android at home" and the year was 2012. This was google's first effort at home automation, and besides $60 lightbulbs you could turn off wirelessly that nobody at the time needed, we had the Q. The main focus for Q was audio. Fancy, high quality audio. It had a very nice amp. It even had very fancy hardware to allow synchronized audio playback without software resampling (an oscillator we could change the frequency of to pull it to master's freq). There was a second device in the works - a cheaper one, since Q was not at all cheap to make. We had a huge TV in our area of the building. And one day, on said TV, we saw the announcement of chromecast. By google. This was the first any of us heard of it. It did 90% of what our device did, but we were targeting $xxx and it was $15... At this point in time, the android and the non-android parts of google did not communicate much, and kept many secrets from each other. I doubt the folks in the chrome team even knew of our project. At google IO we took preorders for the Q, but given this new "chromecast" thing, it made no sense to continue, so everyone who pre-ordered one got one for free, and no support was ever provided, nor were any updates. In theory, the android bits for it are published and you can build android for it just fine.
It feels like if there wasn't an insurmountable incompatibility issue, the Nexus Q could've/should've been able to run alongside Chromecast as a high-end version... and probably still work today if a single "convert to Chromecast" sort of update had been developed for it.
I still have it somewhere... easily the nicest piece of hardware I ever owned, and disappointingly, the one that lasted the shortest time.
https://www.exploitee.rs/index.php/Rooting_The_Google_OnHub
Dis: Googler, not near Nest/Home
Small businesses with fewer products are arguably more incentivized to ensure each product lasts long-term, but it's not uncommon to see them moving on from product to product, too. They just have far fewer in total to see "Google ends yet another product!"-esque headlines about.
> OnHub’s software includes advanced and always-evolving security features that update automatically to help protect your network, your data, and all your devices.
LOL
You can't control retail inventory (well, for some products retailers report serial numbers sold, so maybe you can), but you can make relatively solid assumptions that if you shipped the units to the store/retail warehouse, they're either going to sell them or return them within some period of time, maybe 3-6 months. So assume last sale was 6 months after the last shipment.
But yes, every time i bought one of their products i had 5 years of updates, and by that time it was out of retail for years.
That hardware bears trademarks that Google controls, so it's not purely a third-party product. Google may not be able to prevent retailers from selling off their remaining stock, but they should at least be able to prevent the manufacturers from sending any more to retailers, and inform retailers that the products are discontinued.
Wow, I'm not familiar if users are forced to use the Google Home app, but that seems a bit drastic to stop users from even changing the most basic settings?
Edit: Being forced to use an app is not new. If you visit your routers ip address you get a single page that links to the app for the app stores. Funny enough it still links to the Google Wifi app and not the Google Home app.
Aren't they reaching into Your device to remove functionality? Isn't this vandalism, and a crime?
I'm sure it's not criminal, given today's laws.
Think about that statement though. It absolutely should, morally, be criminal to take away something that was sold as functioning.
Imagine in the 80s that VCR manufacturers sent people to your home at night to open your VCR and cut some traces so it could play but no longer record. Would be an outrage. Also, fortunately, was in practice impossible.
Just because today devices are built to enable damaging functionality from afar doesn't means it is suddenly ok.
My car includes free service as a feature, that doesn't mean they can take off the wheels while I sleep and call it 'service'.
Similarly I don't think any reasonable person or judge will agree bricking a device is called 'update'.
I had a bunch of IoT lightbulbs intentionally bricked by the manufacturer. I can't remember the name of the company now. Something beginning with "F," and ending with "Electric," I think. This was back in the days before HomeKit, when IoT was even more Wild West than it is today.
I had about a dozen of the light bulbs around the house, all controlled by the company's hub, and an app on the phone. One day the company sent an e-mail stating that the system was no longer supported and would no longer function, and it also sent a forced software update to the hub, disabling everything.
I searched around the internet and found lots of people who were mad that the gear they paid for suddenly stopped functioning for no reason. Lots of speculation, but nobody ever seemed to nail down why.
'Just don't leave hone without a bulletproof vest'
There are no 'dumb' tvs left any more. Soon the same fate will befall all other devices.
If I did buy a "smart" thing, it would have to be rootable and hackable and OSS-friendly (e.g. I need to be able to control it if the company goes belly up) or I won't buy it.
Yup.
On a related note: I haven't been able to find a way to root it for OpenWRT. Does anyone know of any resource, other than the OpenWRT website, that could be helpful?
Every time I trusted you with my money for hardware I ended up with paperweights.
They don’t even open up the protocols for products they artificially eol, you have to dump them.
Never ever again.
I had like to ask them what about the millions of perfectly usable phones that had to be ditched because of Android and the vendor lock ins.
Whether carbon offsets actually work is another issue though
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible
There is a neighbouring diagnostic info endpoint that doesn't require Auth, and that works fine.
The phone apps end up having to keep up with the underlying android+ios stacks' ever changing details, but even worse are the cloud services that help make the app -> router connection seamless, with the need to keep up with the ever-ongoing churn required to run binaries on Google's servers (aka "in Production").
To give an idea of how much churn is required to run binaries "in Production", there is a 6 month build horizon enforced across the company to ensure that all teams keep up with the underlying churn (changes to security, rpc, filesystems, monitoring, libc, etc). Running binaries older than that is verboten. The reasoning is that teams building the underlying components would never get a chance to upgrade / turndown down-versions/ down-compatibility.
Supporting these products means requiring staffing the role of keeping these services running from both dev+ops perspectives.
It sounds crazy but the system is designed to build "at scale" rather than to be built "sustainably". Dealing with this ever ongoing churn is the typical life of a Google engineer building "in prod". The model works well with a healthy CI/CD (albeit still a waste of time to deal with mandated churn), but falls apart quickly when staffing is removed.
an idea - "Cloud free" label for hardware similar to "GMO free" for food
--Cloud free
--Cloud required
--Cloud supplemented
The last one would need to be accompanied by a list of features that depend on the cloud.
Expiration dates should also be required. "Guaranteed support for X years from original release date; Y Years from date of final official sale."
I'm not inherently against products that use or require cloud infrastructure to function, but I think consumers should have the information needed to make an informed decision.
GeForce now is a better model. You buy your games on diverse platforms and the subscription to run them on remote hardware separately. Your games are still there on your computer even if GeForce now is gone.
In this case I'm thinking about the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (UK) which has a 7 year time limit for goods not fit for purpose (which a router that only lasted 2 years definitely counts as).
That was the reason I sold (for a symbolic price) my Chromecast Audio years ago, the integration was getting increasingly unreliable in Android, and I was afraid that the next step would have been to shut down its servers entirely
« Wi-Fi you can count on »
Oh the irony.
I’m curious, does anyone know when the product stopped being sold?
Google presumably financially benefits from me buying it's products.
I'd be shocked if there wasn't a valid fraud claim here (assuming I had recently purchased a device without being aware of the end of support).
This isn't just a question of warranty, it's a question of lying for financial benefit.
The manufacturer warranty is 2 years for both the TP-Link[3] and Asus[4] OnHub models.
If there were a class action, it would be against TP-Link and Asus. These manufacturers would then take the losses into consideration before collaborating with Google in the future.
[1] https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/6279...
[2] https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/6314...
[3] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/tp-link-google-onhub-ac1900-dua...
[4] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-onhub-wireless-ac-router-w...
For example, the TP-Link limited warranty explicitly identifies TP-Link USA Corp. as the warrantor:
> TP-Link USA Corp. (“TP-Link USA”) provides a limited warranty on all eligible TP-Link products purchased in the United States.
https://www.amazon.com/Google-WiFi-Router-TP-Link-Managed/dp...
https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-reviews/32...
Which is hilarious because of course they didn't. They never do. How many times does Google have to fuck their hardware customers before people wise up? This isn't even the first time Google has done this explicitly to force customers to buy into the Nest ecosystem. Remember when they bought Revolv and then bricked all their $300 smart home hubs to force people to buy Nest hubs instead? Anyone who trusts Google not to drop them the very instant it becomes profitable to do so is a damn fool.
More importantly, the Asus RT-N66U is still fully functional and still supported on the Asus Router mobile app.[3] Unlike OnHub, Asus routers that run on non-Google firmware have a web interface so the network settings will continue to be adjustable even after app support ends.
Older Asus routers, including the RT-N66U, tend to be supported by open source firmware like DD-WRT.[4] OnHub is not.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006QB1RPY
[2] https://www.asus.com/supportonly/rtn66u_(verb1)/HelpDesk_Dow...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.asus.aihom...
[4] https://forum.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_devices#As...
Source: I worked on the team (iOS app) for the first two or three years.