Motiv Ring

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

~ the goodbye ~

I spend my working life deciding what a device still has to be able to do when the link back to the server is gone. That is the whole job on anything that flies, and it is a question consumer hardware is usually allowed to answer badly. The Motiv Ring answered it badly and then got taken at its word by the people who bought one.

The ring came out at CES Unveiled on 3 January 2017 at $199, and it won an innovation award on the strength of being an actual ring rather than a bracelet pretending to be jewelry. Titanium and waterproof, with five days between charges. It tracked heart rate, sleep, steps and active minutes, and it synced to a phone app. Production slipped and the first units reached buyers in the autumn of 2017. Motiv dated its own beginning to more than six years before April 2020, and it shipped two things nobody else had: a ring sizing kit mailed out before purchase, and later what it called the first FIDO2-certified biometric authentication in a ring, with Touch ID and Face ID style verification announced in February 2019.

The company sold into 32 countries, by its own count, and then on 27 April 2020 it announced it was joining Proxy, a San Francisco company building digital identity for door access and workplaces. Proxy hired, in its chief executive's own words, a majority of Motiv's employees. Proxy described itself in the language of door access and workplace credentials, and the ring appears in the announcement mostly as a product being wound down.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the promise in the faq ~

The announcement was not framed as an ending. Read back now, it is a list of commitments. It said the team would carry on, and that sales of rings and sizing sets had stopped at mymotiv.com. It closed with a sentence addressed to the people already wearing one: "The current generation of Motiv Rings will continue to function and we look forward to opening a new future together with Proxy." Underneath, the FAQ put the only question an owner cared about in its own heading, "Will Proxy continue to support the Motiv App?", and answered it with the word yes and a sentence naming both app stores.

~ what the ring needed ~

A Motiv ring was a sensor and a radio. The interpretation happened in the app, and the app talked to Motiv's servers, so an owner's history and the account it was tied to both lived at the other end of a hostname the acquirer now controlled. Owners reported afterward that neither half did anything useful once the servers stopped answering.

That architecture was ordinary in 2017 and it is why the ending needs no malice to explain it. Nobody has to decide to brick a ring. Somebody only has to stop paying for the instance it was talking to.

~ the site that came back ~

Three weeks is as tight as the archive gets. The full site was serving on 24 December 2020 and the blog was still answering on 22 January 2021. On 10 February a running-gear site noticed the domain was offline and wrote a short post asking whether Motiv had gone. By 3 March 2021 mymotiv.com was back up as a 6 KB page carrying one line: "Motiv has closed its business and rings are no longer available." It pointed owners at a PDF manual for troubleshooting. Troubleshooting was not among the things available to a ring that could no longer sign in.

Then the notice went away. By 1 August 2021 the apex was serving the original marketing site again, 20,705 bytes of it, with the product copy intact and the quotes from reviewers still in place, and the archive shows that same page repeating byte for byte through 2023. For more than two years after the business closed, the official website of the Motiv Ring was a sales page for a ring that could not turn on.

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