The company that owns Juicebox is quitting the US market and removing all its apps and software updates.
I think a lot of us saw this coming for a while based on how they were treating the “smart” functionality and apps in general. A year or couple years ago they switched the app software and a bunch of functionality you had access to went away (scheduling, some metrics, etc). As long as I can plug the thing in and it charges, I’ll be okay but still…
Too bad, I kinda dig the name and the asthetic.
This (and 2 broken EVSEs) are why I bought an OpenEVSE 4 years ago. Zero problems since.
Internet connected devices are a mistake. Not only is there non-existent security updates for the device, it means there is a timer on the life of the functions of the device. If a device cannot function offline, you will have a gimped (or completely dead) product soon.
functions like scheduling a charge will no longer work
Case and point. Why did the device ever need the internet to run a clock? It didn’t, but because it was ‘smart’, now it can’t operate a basic time function.
It’s all relative. My cheap Chinese spyware SmartLife devices are free to report the hours I turn my lights on back to China as they please, but they sit on a segmented VLAN with per client isolation.
If they ever EOL’d them, I’ve got more than my money’s worth, and yes, some of them can be flashed, but I’d probably just buy another well established cheap Chinese competitor.
But I agree, the above is not the use case and situation for every IoT device out there, and there are plenty of devices that I would never consider an internet/SaaS dependent version of e.g. medium to large home appliances.
Slight correction, internet connected devices without an open firmware are a misstake.
‘Eh, I’d have to argue that even open firmware devices are a mistake unless they’re really standardized and extremely popular, which aren’t things you can necessarily know when its early in its life cycle.
Open source things either get a cult following, or get that one lone dev that thanklessly keeps it going and then decides to give up and become a sheep farmer… or both.
