Insignia Connect

» see insigniaconnect.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Best Buy is a retailer. Insignia is the name it puts on televisions and kitchen appliances that it has had somebody else build, which is a sensible business with one hard rule attached: a house brand works because the retailer does not have to operate anything after the sale. In November 2016 Best Buy broke that rule, putting the Insignia name on a WiFi smart plug with an app behind it, and through late 2017 it gathered the rest into a platform called Insignia Connect. There was never a launch announcement for the platform. The name was simply in use by that December, which meant the company had quietly agreed to run a cloud service for as long as the devices existed.

It did not last two years under that name. On 3 September 2019 a Best Buy social media specialist posted in the company's own support forum that after 6 November 2019 the Insignia Connect app would no longer be available, and that control through Amazon and Google voice assistants would go with it. The affected products were a WiFi smart plug, an in-wall light switch, a WiFi camera and a connected upright freezer, which is an unusual list to find on one shutdown notice.

What makes it a clean specimen is that the devices degraded differently depending on how much of each one had been in the cloud to begin with. The smart plug kept its physical button and the schedules already loaded onto it, so it remained a plug with a timer. The light switch was still a light switch on the wall. The freezer was still a freezer and still held its temperature, losing only the ability to tell your phone about it. The camera lost everything, because there had never been anything in the camera except a sensor and a radio pointed at a server.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the gift card arithmetic ~

Best Buy did better than most companies do in this situation, which is to say it offered something. Owners could register serial numbers and receive a partial refund as a virtual gift card, with the amount set by which product you had. Then came the two conditions that tell you this was a finance decision rather than an apology: the online claim was capped at ten serial numbers per customer, with anything beyond that handled by telephone, and the window closed on 31 December 2019.

A gift card is also not a refund. It is a refund that has to be spent at the company that just bricked your hardware, which converts a liability into a sale. Nobody involved pretended otherwise, and in fairness nobody had to, since the alternative on offer elsewhere in this category has usually been nothing at all.

~ the shape this keeps taking ~

Revolv is already buried here, killed by Nest with a countdown printed on its own website. So is Iris by Lowe's, the other big-box retailer that worked out mid-stream it had no appetite for running a platform, and Wink, which went the opposite direction and demanded five dollars a month or the hub would stop answering. Insignia Connect is the variant where the retailer leaves politely, on a date it published in advance, holding a gift card.

Corporate malice has very little to do with any of them. A smart home device is two products sold as one, an object plus a subscription that nobody priced as a subscription, and the second has an operating cost that keeps running long after the first has been paid for. Retailers discover this later than hardware companies do.

There has never been a Best Buy store in Turkey, so the brand stamped on these boxes carries no weight here beyond its appearances in American tech coverage. I have never held an Insignia anything. What reached me was the pattern rather than the product, and by 2019 the pattern had repeated often enough that a cloud dependency inside a wall plug read as a known risk rather than a feature. The people who bought these paid to learn the same lesson firsthand.

Ask for insigniaconnect.com now and it answers with a 200 and fifty three kilobytes of Best Buy's live Insignia brand page. Nothing announces that anything ended. A status code alone would tell you the product is fine, and only the address bar, showing insignia.com where you asked for Insignia Connect, gives away that the name has been folded back into the catalog it came out of.

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