Kevo app shutdown
37 comments
·September 22, 2025Negitivefrags
molticrystal
Maybe cut the wires from the current circuit board(s) and throw in a ESP32 with wifi and bluetooth and driver board for the servos.
numbsafari
Don’t buy anything from Assa Abloy, local or not.
jakedata
"ends support for smartphone enabled"...
If anyone thought for one second that any device which requires external "cloud" support would continue work beyond what is convenient/profitable for the provider then I have a wifi-only dishwasher to sell you. No, really - please buy it from me.
theamk
it's worse than that - those locks are bluetooth-based, so they don't care about the cloud.
What happened is that they are disabling the app, so it is no longer usable.
gblargg
So many of the smart apps won't even launch without an Internet connection (i.e. connection to their cloud services), even if you just want to control local Bluetooth devices.
mingus88
It depends. According to the link this lock was supported for over ten years, and the landscape for this type of device was pretty Wild West back then. There are a lot of devices that never even got that much support.
Today, give me any HomeKit supported device and I’m satisfied it will work for as long as I need it to without some dodgy 3rd party app siphoning my data.
And let’s be honest, if you were buying fridges or washing machines based on WiFi features that’s on you. Locks and lights have legitimate uses for remote control and always have.
itake
> And let’s be honest, if you were buying fridges or washing machines based on WiFi features that’s on you.
I don't understand what you mean by this? My clothes will smell really bad if I leave them in the washer wet. If the appliance has a leak, I need to be nearby to remediate. Thus its not safe for me to start the appliance before I leave for 8+ hours.
If I can remotely start my washing machine, just prior to me arriving home, I can move the clothes to the dryer.
kikkia
Don't most washers and dryers have timed start like dishwashers do? I always remember mine having pictures like that but maybe that's just not a common thing
rkomorn
Remote start, and finish notifications, are genuinely useful things.
At the same time, I don't know if they're actually worth the downsides of needing to create an account, having hackable IoT things, installing an app per appliance brand (at least), etc vs, say, a timer and/or delay.
z3ugma
Ugh, I'm so incensed. This is the 2nd IOT product in my home getting bricked within 2 months.
This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat over at https://sett.homes/ . It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant. Nest has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.
I bet the same approach would work for the Kevo lock that I've got too...
leakycap
> "After more than a decade of service .... users can no longer open/close or manage their door lock via the mobile app or web portal."
Wow, a whole ten years for a door lock.
Kind of like wemo's recent abandonment/EOL of their plugs... a big company like belkin can't keep an on/off switch working?
Moto7451
As an owner of a few of those smart plugs I can attest they didn’t work properly when supported. You could get them paired in matter but they just fall off the network and never come back until you did a full reset.
I’m sure a few people didn’t have trouble but the Wemo support forum and Reddit were justifiably full of anger at the products.
gblargg
The cost of keeping the outlets working was more than their calculated user dissatisfaction cost.
uptown
They just couldn’t refrain from the self-congratulatory bullshit.
VladVladikoff
Sort of surprising that the app is cloud based rather than Bluetooth. You would expect a Bluetooth lock to keep working even if the cloud infrastructure was offline. And if the locks are only wifi, doesn’t that mean they would go through batteries like crazy? How long can a battery powered smart lock stay online?
bri3d
They’re Bluetooth based and worked offline, but like so many “cloud” products, the app required an account which it seems to use to provision the key material for Bluetooth. I’m assuming they’re shutting down the account servers - so depending on how long the app goes between logins (or if the key material expires or not), it may be possible to extend their use.
This would be a fun reverse engineering project, probably!
reactordev
And lose the ability to data mine and show you ads while you try to get into your own home, fat chance…
baobun
2 months notice is very short, especially considering some of these will have been deployed for a decade... A year or so would have been expected.
Some of these will have their owners on the other side of the world with no way to get back in time.
Keep this in mind next time you consider depending on Assa Abloy - bummer to see them lose their ways.
gblargg
If you don't have the physical key available to you outside your house, you failed to have a backup option for the inevitable failure of the electronics.
esseph
Meh, nothing a drill with a decent bit won't fix
ashayh
Buy locally configurable stuff only.
That means Zigbee and Zwave and use them with Home Assistant. There are many locks and devices which support either. There's a learning curve in the beginning, but once you set it up correctly not only you get privacy and control your own devices, you also get far more options for automations and useful or plain cool things in general.
syntaxing
I honestly think mandatory local support for HomeKit standard is one of the best designs. I lost internet despite having power due to a city wide outage. Having HomeKit still work for smart lights and outlet + home assistant was awesome. Pretty much anything HomeKit supported will last “perpetually” for its smart features.
wpm
I remember a year or two ago the FCC was here in the comments asking people about IoT and what we felt the issues were.
Sadly, I have no hope of anything to come out of that, not that the current admin really changed anything about that hope either.
This sort of shutdown should, immediately, with the full force of the law, mandate a release of a working version of the software and a working firmware update to switch it to that version of the software, that is licensed MIT or BSD, with full source code, that allows one to build the app themselves and keep using it as it was.
If you don't wanna keep rolling with it, fine, go ahead and move off of it. But this enshittified rug pull is infuriating and it cannot be allowed to continue this way. Absolute scummy behavior. Just fucking open source it, assholes.
dmitrygr
Turns out that the “S” in “IoT” stands not only for “security” but also for “support”.
brian-armstrong
Sorry for the convenience
This annoys me greatly.
When I built my house I went full home automation. At the time I was telling my friends about how important it was not to have cloud dependancy, and how I was doing everything local.
I use KNX as the main backbone and Home Assistant for control.
And everything was local with the one exception of my Kevo door lock. At the time I built, there just wasn’t a perfect local only solution.
I hadn’t planned properly for a way to integrate a wired in solution into the joinary around the door due to the particular circumstances of where it was, so I needed something wireless, and nothing wireless was local only at the time.
What pisses me off is that it’s the one thing I compromised on, and it’s the one thing that bit me.
Now I have very little notice to find a replacement with the same features.