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.
Might as well just go to rent a center instead of buying smart shit.
This is yet another example of businesspeople taking laypeople for a ride. They want a lifeline to your wallets.
If you want fancy IoT that’s quick to set up, look for Matter devices with full offline support
While the Matter spec requires offline control support, it doesn’t require full OEM independence, so you have to look up the individual devices first to check if they’re independent. The main difference being that some OEMs have a lot of extra features outside the Matter spec and other extras which require an account and device registration, etc, so check that the specific features you want works FULLY offline and with 3rd party apps. (I’ve seen Matter controller devices with screens and whatnot which are only configurable with the OEM app)
You can use Home Assistant with its Matter module (open source) as your home controller, together with necessary radios (specifically Thread/Zigbee), and firewall off your devices if you want full control.
And Home Assistant of course also has support for a little bit of everything, like MQTT and custom HTTP commands and more, so you can still control random devices even if they don’t support Matter