The smart home graveyard is getting crowded: June Oven goes dark

Former Apple engineers built the June Oven a decade ago: a smart countertop oven with a camera that could recognise food and cook it. Last Tuesday it went dark. Weber, which bought June in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, switched off the app and the cloud services behind it. “The shutdown of June Oven is just another reminder that the cloud was never ours to keep,” writes Jennifer Pattison Tuohy in The Verge on September 27.

What owners lost

Owners keep an oven and nothing else: app control, updates and AI food recognition are gone. A factory reset, Tuohy notes, could turn the appliance into a permanent brick. Weber told her it considered open-sourcing the technology, but refused because June's intellectual property is part of its Weber Connect platform. June co-founder Matt Van Horn says he tried in vain to keep the servers online.

A crowded graveyard

June joins a long list. In the past two years the Nest Secure, Belkin's WeMo line, Neato's robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech's Pop buttons and Bose's SoundTouch speakers all lost their cloud lifelines. Local protocols such as Zigbee, Thread or Apple's HomeKit saved a few; most now live in a zombie state.

The damage is usually partial: June and Brava ovens still bake, Nest thermostats still control heating and a Neato still vacuums, but remote access, voice control and updates are gone, and devices like the Nest Secure become pure e-waste. Two June owners are now building Project July, a local server that restores app control and camera streaming over home Wi-Fi.

How to protect yourself

Cloud servers were once cheaper than a local hub, but they cost money forever, and once a product is shelved the willingness to pay fades. Many early smart home firms were bought by bigger companies whose new owners cut back: Assa Abloy fired most of Level Lock's team. Cloud dependence is also a business model: Chamberlain's MyQ blocked “unauthorised API access” to keep Home Assistant users out.

Tuohy says three things are needed: consumer protection, safeguards built into devices and informed buyers. Consumer Reports wants legislation forcing manufacturers to expose a local API before killing a cloud service. Devices should have physical buttons, work offline and support local protocols; the Matter standard keeps devices working inside a Matter platform even after their maker disappears. Manufacturers should “design for death from day one”, as Stacey Higginbotham puts it, and plan the funeral too: Amazon refunded recent Halo buyers. The safest buy is a device with local control that works offline, because a gadget that only talks to the cloud is already halfway in the grave.