Weber shuts down June Oven, smart home graveyard grows — SkimNews
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- Weber shut off cloud services and app support for the June Oven this past Tuesday, leaving owners without software updates, AI food recognition, or remote control, and declined to open-source the technology for any would-be rescuer.
- The June Oven joins a growing 'smart home graveyard' that in the last two years has claimed the Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin's WeMo line, Neato robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech Pop buttons, Bose SoundTouch speakers, and Sengled smart bulbs.
- Assa Abloy acquired Level Lock — another former-Apple-engineer smart-home startup — and then abruptly fired most of the team, leaving the lock brand's long-term viability an open question.
- Consumer Reports is lobbying for legislation that would require manufacturers to push a local API to connected IoT devices before killing cloud services, the same path Bose took when it open-sourced its SoundTouch API.
- The Matter smart home standard is designed so devices retain many functions on a Matter platform regardless of whether the manufacturer's business survives, alongside local protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Bluetooth.
Why it matters: The buyer of a $1,495 June Oven is effectively renting its smart features from a company that can pull the plug at any time, and Weber's refusal to open-source the technology means even tinkerers can't rescue it. Without Consumer Reports-backed legislation or a Matter-style pivot to local-first design, consumers keep paying full price for products with hidden expiration dates.
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