The date has been on the calendar for several months, but it remains no less painful for the users concerned. Starting this Saturday, almost all Wemo devices will lose their connection to Belkin cloud services. End of remote access, goodbye to voice commands via Google Assistant or Alexa, curtain on automations hosted online.
“Smart” objects… not for long
On paper, the devices do not die. In fact, they lose what made them so interesting. A connected socket that can no longer be controlled from the sofa, a “smart” switch reduced to a simple wall button, a smart coffee maker that becomes… a coffee maker again. Everything still works, but the old way. Belkin drives the point home by announcing the end of updates to the Wemo application as of January 31. More fixes, more developments, more technical support. The ecosystem is officially fixed, and with it the user experience.
All is not lost, however. Some devices escape the great extinction. Models based on the Thread protocol (three-way switch, scene controller, connected socket and video doorbell) continue to function normally, provided they go through HomeKit, Apple’s home automation platform.
Same thing for other HomeKit-compatible Wemo products: they remain usable, but only if they were configured in the Apple ecosystem before the fateful date. After January 31, there is no going back. Those who have not planned ahead will have to settle for manual use, without connected frills. Belkin does promise a “partial refund” for devices still under warranty, but without much detail. A modest consolation that does not compensate for either the loss of functionality or the feeling of abandonment that many customers may legitimately feel.
Basically, the Wemo affair is nothing exceptional. It illustrates a structural problem of the connected home: these objects live under the permanent threat of disconnection from their manufacturers’ servers. As long as the cloud is powered, everything is fine. The day it dies, uses sometimes collapse overnight.
Belkin didn’t act on impulse. By 2023, the manufacturer had distanced itself from the Matter standard and paused its ambitions in the connected home. No new Wemo products have been released since. The cloud shutdown therefore seems less like a surprise than the logical epilogue of a gradual withdrawal. And too bad for consumers.
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