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.
The biggest mistake I made in my home was installing $3k in Nest gear, right before they were purchased by Google and the forthcoming Homekit support was abandoned. I cannot wait to get my Ubiquiti camera drops wired so I can stop paying the whopping $20/mo for cloud storage that was $8/mo when I started.
Tl;dr: Fuck Google
I dipped my toes into “smart” thermostats with a Wyze. Meh. I don’t really need to set the temp from my phone, or any of the other features, beyond having a simple schedule. I’m seriously considering reverting all the way back to an old-school bimetal strip, dial on the wall type, in private protest of all this crap.
(Don’t get a Wyze. I think they’ve been discontinued anyway. The damn thing loses connection to the wifi three or four times per year, then I need to go through the ENTIRE setup process again, from the very beginning. The wifi antenna is in the closet not three feet away. POS.)
Those things should be zwave or matter or something sensible, not WiFi anyway.
Smart home = control over you. Just don’t do it.
This is a blanket statement that doesn’t really hold up.
Commercial off the shelf cloud service based smart home = control over you.
Fully self hosted smart home = control over your house.
I’m imagining some poor rube who bought fully into the IoT. Like every appliance they own is smart. Then one day they wake up to their entire house no longer functioning because the smart devices can’t connect to whatever services they need. Can’t even work the smart locks on their doors.
IoT isn’t exactly reliable and many, including the rich are trying to reverse the IoT trend: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/real-estate/tech-free-homes-luxury-trend-1236177909/
also
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/23/analog-bag-screen-free-wellness
Calm down, Francis, the thermostat can still be used and programmed manually. The only features lost are remote settings which we never used once.
Pretty much happening if support disappears for 2.4GHz wifi. Most of these smart devices require it, and many wifi routers don’t even bother transmitting it unless you specifically activate that option.
Oh how kind of them! They force disconnect an appliance but give you a coupon to buy the latest model.
And the newest model is different how? It’s a thermostat after all.
Whole reason I got one was because of the promised savings (never saw any, from the learning, just bullshit offers that allowed the electric company access…).
Guess it’s back to the tried and true mercury thermostat.
Yeah if my thermostat starts talking to the internet, its getting buckshot in it.
Think thats lead, not mercury tbh.
(Unless you are not a shit hunter that miss som much you can afford the vismuth)
During winter no less! :/
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Source Hardware (OSH) for the win!!!
See also: Enshitification
Twenty years ago Google was a small, fun startup that was easy to be a fan of. How the mighty have fallen. “Do no evil,” huh? Disgusting.
We adopt new tech simply because it exists, not because it is wise to do so.
Joke’s on them, mine hasn’t been connected since about 2018. Works very well as just a thermostat
I bought a $500 dollar video security system and they pulled this shit on me. Not Google, but Arlo. Not even a ‘hey we will just disable some of the cloud benefits’ just straight up disabled my shit and gave me a shitty ‘heres 10 percent off a new system!’ email. I don’t buy into smart always connected tech much as is, but that was def a reason for me to not buy anything further.
Release the specs so users can maintain them themselves.
Good.
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.
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’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.
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 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.
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
Dumb thermostats last for multiple decades.
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.
As do smart thermostats that don’t rely on the continued goodwill of any corporation to function.
Which ones are those?
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.
I saw the photo with a person for scale and I thought…why?
One of the apartments I lived in had a Honeywell wifi connected one that worked pretty well.
Z-wave thermostats don’t require Internet connectivity to function or control remotely. They do require something like Home Assistant for that remote control.
Yup, this is what I just did. Replaced my two first generation Nests with Z-Wave Honeywells.
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.
Anything that supports HomeKit should work indefinitely. I have an ecobee4 that works great with Home Assistant via HomeKit.
I’ve got one of those with bi-metallic strips, it’s 35 years old, works no problem.
Surprisingly, these still work as dumb thermostats after the cutoff date.
This isn’t “end of support.”
This is “loss of functionality.”
Totally inexcusable.
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.
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.
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.
