Will Your Smart Vacuum Still Work?

Lifehacker ask Will Your Smart Vacuum Still Work After It Stops Being Supported?:

My Neato D5 Connected was once a willing workhorse, but, today, things aren’t looking so good. I recently caught an email from the company alerting me that it shut down my vacuum’s cloud servers. Now, my once capable Neato is just a LiDAR-equipped vacuum with a soul that’s been deprecated. Without cloud servers, the “smart” is gone.

The device is only as smart as the servers it has to connect to. Servers that the vendor can shut down at any time. It’s a bit like that movie protagonist that can only do the task because they have an earpiece and someone else speaking through it.

On the case of the Neato from the article above, the company went under in 2023 and the one who bought the assets continued to run the servers, until now. So the device will be limited.

But with iRobot bankruptcy, the question is even more relevant about all these Roomba and how well they can work. Not all model require the servers, but the new owner of the product might see through it differently.

It really is time that there is proper legislation about tying functionality to online servers, and how it is to be handled when the company stops. This is part of a right to repair effort.