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?
The S in IoT stands for security.
‘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?
Remind me of an old song by “The Who.”
Logitech shutdown the Squeezebox service early last year. But, thanks to open source alternatives, a used Squeezebox Touch still sells for $100+.
Open source alternatives indeed! Logitech open-sourced the squeezebox server code out the gate. https://lyrion.org/ is based on that release. I’ve never had a mysqueezebox account and I’ve been using Squeezebox Radios for over a decade. Toss LMS on a NAS and rock on!
Squeezebox was always much better with a local server. No need for a Logitech account. Logitech canned the entire ecosystem over 10 years ago. A terrible decision. I was very irked. Fortunately they open sourced everything and it has since been continually maintained by a superb, active and large, community. It’s now called Lyrion Music Server. There are many plugins. The BBC Sounds one puts Sonos to shame. And Spotify works a dream.
I have many Squeezeboxes, from the SB3, Radio, Boom and Touch. They are fantastic.
I don’t like anything dependent on third party services. I remember looking at Den, and rapidly decided it was a bad idea. Shelly, however, is different – sure, it’s cloud based. But like Squeezebox, doesn’t need to be. It can all work 100% LAN based. I’ve installed hundreds of Shelly devices for clients. They’ve never let me down.
I picked up a second hand Squeezebox, and it is brilliant. Off course I have my self hosted music server (LMS) that integrates with Home Assistant very well. I play free internet radios completely ad-free. I have added several other speakers to the system, through the airplay plugin plus a few ESP32s that bring the older speakers up to date.
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.
Sounds more like the cloud selleth, then the cloud stealeth
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
ahem spotify ahem car thing ahem ahem
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?
I made a rule too: Whenever I want a nice IoT device that is pricey, I wait that the mothership goes belly up and that an open-source firmware or mod exist before buying it for dirt cheap.
Z-Wave is well supported by numerous vendors, including open source ones. My home is mostly Z-wave and I use Home assistant to run the show in a simple and hassle-free fashion.
Logitech offers everyone (even outside the US) who visits its store 15% off so this isn’t much of a gesture of goodwill.
Not much of a gesture of goodwill either way. “Hey, that thing you bought from us? We’re remotely killing it. As our way of saying we’re sorry, why not buy something else from us at a small discount, huh?”
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.
Have a look at Valetudo for that. It’s basically rooting your vacuum and putting a light weight web server on it that can communicate over MQTT. Installing that also adds a host file entry to blackhole any request outside your network.
I set that up on my Dreame to connect to HA, and I’ve been really happy with it!
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 )
I think most here at Hackaday would just shrug when things like going POP happens. Anything I do for home automation is built/programmed by me. A Pico here, a relay there, a switch over there, another Pico 2, etc… And all local, no internet access. Where is the fun of having devices controlled/built/monitored by a outside company?
Sounds like Logitech discovered serious and unfixable security vulnerabilities in these devices. Would you rather they shut down the line of products or would your prefer to expose your home to hackers? This is the problem with being an early adopter of any product these days …
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.
Except that these devices have known security vulnerabilities and tend to call home to china at unexpected times. Never give them internet access…
Ah remember back when Amazon was giving buttons away for free and you could just hack them to work locally for automation?
This seems to follow on from Logitech dropping support for their (once) industry leading range of programmable Harmony remote controls.
They also sold off another great tech in their 3d Connexions division.
Logitech seems to come up with great tech, but little follow through or ability to monetize it properly. Sad, really
Harmony hasn’t been killed yet. They stopped making new ones, but they haven’t shut down their servers and remotely killed them…yet.
There should be a law saying that companies that sell connected devices have to open-source the interface/code of they terminate the service, and allow customers to either switch to a third-party/community hub or host their own service at home.
Also give a procedure (and keys if needed) to allow flashing with new firmware.
Logitech is the ID in IoT … get it?
Any consumers of this product in Australia, I would recommend taking Logitech to court over this in a class action, such egregious omissions of service limitations make for very successful cases here in Australia.
Under Australian Consumer Law (ACL) Section 18, conduct can be unlawful if it is misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead, even if there was no intention to deceive.
Courts here tend to examine whether a consumer relied on the misleading information and suffered loss as a result.
Given that logitech has failed to provide any alternative such as open source code or localised service options, along with failing to provide sufficient reimbursement to cover the costs of the items that are now e-waste, I would speculate that this could make for a very good consumer rights case here.
Just like the gaming community is pushing “Stop Killing Games”, the IoT community should be pushing for legislation that forces any manufacturer of cloud-connected devices to provide substantial offline functionality, release full source under an open license, and/or provide full-value refunds/credits when ending centralized cloud support. Having these buttons stop working in exchange of a 15% coupon is bitter right now, but we’re going to see this happen more often and with increasingly expensive devices. A pretty bad shitstorm is brewing with all the EVs on the road that require cloud connectivity. How many of those will be bricked because the manufacturer can no longer be bothered to provide software support in the next decades?
Way overblown worry in one sense while also being unaware of the real issue. No you can’t brick a car because of software updates. If there’s a critical safety flaw the companies are required to take and fix the cars for the customer. It’s called a recall. So nothing could brick a car since they would have to fix anything that might be used as an excuse to brick it.
On the other hand, none of the cars being sold today spend very much time being out of contact with someone in the supply chain. Whether it’s tesla and their location data/full camera coverage both inside and outside the car for every trip, down to the older version of dealers installing GPS trackers in any car that wasn’t bought outright with cash, and some that were.
We all ooze this apparently supremely valuable substance called “data” for them to “mine”, so if there’s no airtight privacy laws protecting you, then they would be doing a disservice to their shareholders if they didn’t collect that data to sell off. From where you go to when you go there to what you eat on your way there. They must know it all! Pays for the 3g modem in no time. (I bet they miss 2g too)
Not the first time Logitech does this shit either. Remember the Harmony remotes they “discontinued”? Stop buying Logitech! Start lobbying for laws against these practices.
It’s sort of funny, sort of sad and also MIGHTY SCARY how many apparently tech-savvy people here do not have or at one point did not have any qualms to (1) automate their homes, (2) do so over the internet, and (3) do so while relying on the continued services of a commercial provider, with no backup plan other than to declare the machinery e-waste. IMHO in society at large, that pretty much directly translates into too many facilities, factories and services being vulnerable to all kinds of cyber-attacks and spying. To me it’s a failure of society that for example in my city the people that were stationed on each subway platform to dispatch trains were replaced by cameras, and now they have done the same with surface trains, too. This is so eerie.
https://cdn.caeducatorstogether.org/files/uploaded/imported/1/resource/98e2b112-a4ce-5437-9774-23cf10370c70/ZtacKhz.jpg
I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud
Level 2 Jeff
2,043,727 views – Mar 24, 2025
Sadly, it seems all appliance manufacturers are going this route. Where will we be in 5-10 years next time I need to buy a new dishwasher? Probably even worse off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M_hmwBBPnc
HOUSE OF HORRORS
“Mr. Robot” played to our worst technology fears with a mini horror movie about a hacked smart home
July 15, 2016
https://qz.com/733269/mr-robot-played-to-our-worst-technology-fears-with-a-mini-horror-movie-about-a-hacked-smart-home/
https://vimeo.com/178324074
I stopped buying this type of tech after Logitech abandoned the Harmony Remote Control’s. They could have at least open sourced it and let the hacking community go at it. Heck a whole lotta bugs would have sure gotten fixed! I ended up with like 7 harmony remotes and two hub the in no time at all became useless due to changing equipment (tv, DVR ect) and unable to update the remote anymore.
Logitech has a really bad habit of abruptly pulling the plug leaving customers whom have spent then money with useless devices and nothing really to show for it.
Logitech abruptly pulled the plug on their first Google TV devices
ALL of the companies do it, some are just more thoughtful of their customers than others. All you can do is BEWARE of the next big thing and decide IF it’s worth the risk to ya! 👍
“You will own nothing and be happy”
The people having their Logitech buttons turn into doorstops don’t seem so happy.
The cloud server to keep this going probably costs $10/month. Sure, there was probably the occasional patch or update, but it’s not like they were developing and adding new features.
It costs Logitech next to nothing to keep this going. I’m sure it costs more in future lost revenue from those not willing to buy new Logitech products after they were abandoned.