For those who missed out on the past few years of ‘smart home’ gadgets, the Logitech POP buttons were introduced in 2018 as a way to control smart home devices using these buttons and a central hub. After a few years of Logitech gradually turning off features on this $100+ system, it seems that Logitech will turn off the lights in two weeks from now. Remaining POP Button users are getting emails from Logitech in which they are informed of the shutdown on October 15 of 2025, along with a 15% off coupon code for the Logitech store.
Along with this coupon code only being usable for US-based customers, this move appears to disable the hub and with it any interactions with smart home systems like Apple HomeKit, Sonos, IFTTT and Philips Hue. If Logitech’s claim in the email that the buttons and connected hub will ‘lose all functionality’, then it’d shatter the hopes for those who had hoped to keep using these buttons in a local fashion.
Suffice it to say that this is a sudden and rather customer-hostile move by Logitech. Whether the hub can be made to work in a local fashion remains to be seen. At first glance there don’t seem to be any options for this, and it’s rather frustrating that Logitech doesn’t seem to be interested in the goodwill that it would generate to enable this option.
The second S in IoT stands for Support.
Well, to their defense, logitech truly came through with the first S in IoT here.
Internet of shitty Things?
‘how do you spell support?’
‘S U F P P O R T’
‘Wait, what? There is no F in support’
‘Now you’re getting it… :-D’
Some 10+ years ago I bought a squeezebox. A day later I returned it to the shop because I was not able to play my own music without creating an account with that company. The thing would not even boot. And that was my last experience with that company.
..You had a SaaS accordion? What?
The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away. Cursed be the cloud. ;-)
That’s while I built my own. 40TB of storage, Jellyfin, NextCloud, and HomeAssistant, an unlocked Android TV, and purely local IoT outlets, switches, sensors, bulbs, and cameras.
IoT and cloud services are awesome, as long as you own them instead of renting them.
Just 7 years and they’re pulling the plug. Next time it may be 7 months. Just can’t trust these companies.
And its Logitech of all brands. Its not some little 5 person company who can’t keep the lights on so they’re closing shop, its a massive company with many device lines.
I’m not very knowledgeable about the hosting costs for these “cloud” services so I gotta ask. I pay a shady website 15$/year to host my single core, 1GB RAM, 30GB/month VPS. Is the software running on Logitech servers really something that takes more resources than this? I mean they’re just forwarding the data to other services (Homeassistant whatever) anyway? Is there any need for a lot of RAM and CPU power?
Sorry not very knowledgeable about these
I’m ignorant enough of the business model to have to ask: how do these corporate entities pay for long term support of a cloud based product without a recurring revenue stream?
I mean, clearly they don’t, but how do they think they would? Or, how do consumers think they would? Is it just a sort of Ponzi scheme?
It is close to a Ponzi scheme: everybody was promised that the cloud was a cheaper alternative to server ownership, only to find that it is a lot more expensive in most cases.
Cloud-based products only make sense if the sales keep growing. When the sales go down, the (continually increasing) cloud costs rapidly make the business unprofitable.
Every vendor has been trying to capture customers with proprietary “standards”, and that did slow down growth overall.
Home equipment is expected to last 10-20 years, while the high-tech industry is expecting a 5 years cycle.
A sad disconnect between the tech billionaires world and the real one.
The vendors who keep replacing their product lines will be losing customers on every transition without understanding why.
After being burnt by logitech’s sudden drop of support on more than one occasion I will not buy anything from them. I might consider their matter products since loosing their servers would not be a problem.
Learned my lesson when Wink Home went belly up a while ago after I spent hundreds of dollars and many hours getting a house full of z-wave sensors and switches set up.
I binned all the Wink hardware and now have a rule: no more non open-source smart home devices, ever.
Did you have a look at Hubitat? This is what I am using for Z-Wave
Have you attempted to use something like github/OpenZWave?
Are there any good lidar mapping vacuum robots that don’t require cloud support? That’s the last device in my home that phones home.
No open source saviour ready to step in and replace the firmware, or set up an alternative server?
I’m happy that all my home automation stuff is local. I have one Shelly relay which is completely self-contained, so it’s a commercial component that doesn’t need internet connectivity. I also have IKEA Tradfri, which is local, but gets updates from the internet periodically. Everything else is diy, such as Tasmota, ESPeasy, or ESPhome.
The best part about IKEA stuff is that basically none of it requires the internet, or even a hub in the first place (with a few exceptions, like the water leak sensor as it needs to send you an alert), and all of it uses common standards like zigbee and matter so they would work with other hubs in the future too. I could yeet my hub right now and the only thing I would lose are the temperature/humidity readings, as those sensors don’t have displays ( they are also the only ones not from Ikea :P )
When i bought my ipcam 15 years ago, i made sure before i bought it that it offered a basic jpeg-over-http interface. Now i don’t bother with that kind of research, i just buy on temu where everything is eager to be usable. haha i can’t believe i typed that ridiculous sentence in full sincerity.
I just haven’t found it that hard to avoid cloud iot garbage so far. Android’s as close to that as i come
It is really ironic that to avoid cloud/vendor lock-in buying the absolute cheapest device money can buy is a workable answer.