The smart home graveyard is getting crowded

The shutdown of June Oven is just another reminder that the cloud was never ours to keep.

by

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Sep 27, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The smart home graveyard is getting crowded

The shutdown of June Oven is just another reminder that the cloud was never ours to keep.

by

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

Sep 27, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy

is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for

Wirecutter

,

Wired

,

Dwell

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BBC

, and

US News

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This isThe Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the fragile state of your connected devices, followJennifer Pattison Tuohy.The Stepbackarrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in forThe Stepbackhere.

How it started

A decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast and cook it perfectly,the June Ovenset the standard for smart cooking appliances. At $1,495, it was absurdly expensive, but it quickly grew a small,devoted followingthat expanded when the company introduced amore modestly priced model.

This past Tuesday,June went dark. Weber, whichbought the company in January 2021and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving its users with a sleek-looking toaster oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition to crisp that strudel perfectly. You can still use it as an oven, but there will be no support or parts, and if youhave to factory reset itfor some reason, that could be the nail in the coffin. Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the factJune’s IP is part of its Weber Connectplatform.

June is just the latest in a depressingly long list of connected products that have arrived in the smart home graveyard in the last two years alone. TheNest Secure, earlyNest Thermostats,Belkin’s WeMo line,Neato’s robot vacuums, theBrava smart oven,Logitech’s Pop buttons,Bose’s SoundTouch speakers, andSengled’s smart bulbsall lost their lifelines. While some were saved by local APIs and protocols — such as Zigbee, Thread, and Apple’s HomeKit, or a Home Assistant integration — most are like the June Oven, destined to live out their days in a zombie state.

How it’s going

The silver lining, if you want to see it, is thatmostof these gadgets degrade rather than die outright. June and Brava will still work as ovens. Nest Thermostats can still control your heating and cooling, just like the $30 plastic wall wart they replaced, and a Neato will still vacuum your floors. But the remote access, voice control, updates, and other smart features you bought the devices for are gone. Some — likeNest Secure— are now pure e-waste.

There’s always the possibility of a rescue, but it’s rare. Some enterprising user may figure out a way to connect a headless corpse toHome Assistant, the open-source platform that has become the default refuge for the smart home undead. When smart lighting platform Insteon shut down in 2022, its usersbought the company and resurrected it. Bose reversed course andopen-sourced its SoundTouch API, and Pebble’s founder broughtthe iconic smartwatchback to life after theRebble alliancekept it on life support. June’s co-founder Matt Van Hornsaid on Xthat he tried to keep the servers online but to no avail.

The smart home has reached a tipping point. Many of its early pioneers are aging out — a decade plus is a long time for a startup. Most have been bought by bigger companies, likely attracted by the shiny thing but then quickly dismayed by the bottom line. Back then, a cloud server was cheaper to build than a local hub, but servers continue to cost money, and once a company decides to shut down a product, reasons to keep paying fade rapidly. This appears to be what’s happening to Level Lock, another former-Apple-engineer startup that produced abeautiful replacement for a common household item. Assa Abloybought the smart lock companyandabruptly fired most of the team. It’s still alive, but how long it will continue is a big question.

What happens next

Three things need to happen to prevent the smart home from burning more users: we need consumer protections; manufacturers need to step up and build in safeguards; we need to know how to protect ourselves.

Consumer Reportsispushing for legislationaround connected IoT devices, including making manufacturers push a local API to a device before killing its cloud. This would allow it to keep talking to a platform like Home Assistant instead of becoming a paperweight. This is essentially whatBose did with SoundTouch, and other companies should follow that lead (I’m not holding my breath on legislation).

When building a connected device, manufacturers need to make it function without the cloud. Include physical buttons so it doesn’t rely on an app, and use local protocols alongside any cloud connectivity. This is a key issuethe smart home standard Matterwas designed to address: Matter devices can retain many functions in a Matter platform, regardless of what happens to the manufacturer’s business. Other local protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Bluetooth similarly help futureproof products.

I fully agree withStacey Higginbotham’s advice to manufacturersthat they need to “design for death from day one,” or at the very least plan to pay for the funeral. Amazon refunded anyone whobought a Halo in the 12 months before it killed the fitness band. Vorwerk promised to keep Neato running for five years; whenthat was truncated to two, it at leastgave some users free replacements. Google offered Nest Secure customers a free replacement from ADT. None of this beats a device that doesn’t need the cloud to function, but it helps ease the pain.

My advice if you’re buying a smart home device remains the same. Make sure it offers local control, has physical buttons (or a direct remote control), and can operate “offline.” Don’t dismiss cloud-connected features; they can add real value, but remember that any feature reliant on a server could one day die. A gadget that only talks to the cloud is already halfway in the grave.

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