Nest Secure

» see store.google.com/product/nest_secure as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

nest secure was a us-and-uk-coded product. the kit centered on a small white hub called nest guard, with nest detect sensors covering doors and windows on the same radio link. small nfc fobs called nest tag handled arming and disarming on touch. starter kit landed at $499 in november 2017, three years after google paid $3.2 billion for nest labs.

home-security hardware never reached turkey at the consumer-retail layer in this era. by then turkish homes that wanted an alarm used a local installer brand with a wired panel and a paid monitoring contract. the smart-home category that nest secure sat inside was the kind of thing you read about on the verge in english, not something you walked into a mediamarkt and bought. revolv had already burned that road before nest secure shipped.

i read about nest secure mostly when the microphone story broke in february 2019. tony fadell had been gone from nest for almost three years by then. google announced that the nest guard would gain google assistant support and casually mentioned that yes, there had always been a microphone inside the hub, it had just never been listed on the spec sheet. the senator letters that followed turned into a quiet pr cycle. the product itself was already off the roadmap.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

nest secure was supposed to be the part of the nest product line that finally answered ring and simplisafe. the hub looked like a small alexa puck. the detect sensors were oval and quiet, and the system spoke z-wave and wifi over the same nest cloud that powered the thermostat and the doorbell.

the launch press treated nest secure as google's first serious entry in home security. that was the wrong read. google quietly stopped selling the kit in october 2020, less than three years in. no successor product was named. retail listings just went away, and existing owners stayed on the old cloud as if nothing had been announced.

~ what really happened ~

on april 7 2023 google sent an email that the cloud service for nest secure would go dark on april 8 2024. one year of notice. there was no on-device-only fallback mode, the hub did not have a local keypad-and-siren mode that worked without the cloud. once the servers stopped responding, the entire kit became plastic.

the comparison to revolv wrote itself. nest had bricked revolv in may 2016. now nest, still under the same google umbrella, was bricking its own product on the same pattern, just with a year of warning instead of two months. google offered a 50% discount on a partnered adt system to existing nest secure owners. the trade-in option went out to a country that the original device had not really sold to outside the us and uk.

~ what got buried with it ~

the nest brand spent the next two years getting absorbed back into google's regular product lines, with matt rogers and tony fadell both long gone. the senate letters about the hidden microphone never produced legislation. nest secure sits in the same plastic-paperweight category as revolv now, two devices killed by the same company on the same schedule of cloud-dependency. the only difference is that google charged $499 the second time.

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