It wasn’t even a good thermostat. It was a mediocre one that served a single purpose: to allow me to set the temperature when I was out of town through a smartphone app. Mind you, it was a pretty bad app too. But for all its shortcomings the little thermostat worked continuously for more than 3 years. It recorded the temperature, turned on the heater at the right time to keep things comfy and made nice daily reports about the usage. It even saved me money on my gas bill. Then in December of 2018, as I was preparing to board a plane, I tried to order it to heat the house. We all try to be as green as possible, so I keep the house cold while I’m away and it takes quite a few hours to bring it up to a livable temperature.

Only the app wasn’t responding. For hours all I got was a blank screen every time I opened it. Of course, I arrived to a cold house, but to my surprise the thermostat was still working on the last setting I left it on before traveling.

Fictionalized reconstruction of the scene waiting for me at home

It was clear that he device was still fine, but the cloud connection had been cut. The website of the producer was gone. In the following days I discovered a letter of apology from the company warning that they may have to shutdown due to financial difficulties. It had been sent a week before my trouble began. The letter had been sorted into Spam.

But none of these elements change the simple fact that I bought a device that stopped working when the company that made it… just died. It wasn’t a service that the company stopped providing. It wasn’t that they chose to end support due to going out of business. The product I bought stopped functioning as expected due to how their producer operated. It is this small and seemingly meaningless event that should worry the Internet of Things (IoT) startup scene. As this happens to more and more people, it will cause a silent extinction.