Revolv

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

~ the obit ~

revolv shipped in october 2013 with a story that read clean on paper. one hub with seven radios that covered every relevant smart-home protocol of the era. z-wave, zigbee, wifi, bluetooth, insteon. you bought it once for $300 and it was supposed to run your house for the rest of its operational life. the marketing copy literally used the phrase "lifetime subscription."

nest bought revolv in october 2014. the hub stopped being sold a few months later. for over a year customers kept using their pucks while the founders worked inside nest on broader home-integration features. then in february 2016 the revolv website got updated with a notice that the cloud service would terminate on may 15. on that date every shipped hub stopped responding to its own app. the device did not malfunction. it was switched off from the outside.

i was not the audience for this product. smart-home hubs in this era lived in the kind of us house that already had a sonos in the kitchen and an opinion about hue bulbs. those things mostly did not ship to turkey, and the ones that did needed us shipping intermediaries who marked them up enough that an early-adopter hub became a serious purchase. revolv specifically was a product i read about in the way you read about a country you have not visited.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the reason revolv made every tech newsletter that week was not the hardware. the puck was fine. the reason it landed was that nest had quietly reframed the meaning of "you bought it." arlo gilbert's medium post in april 2016 was the moment the question got phrased cleanly. if a company can sell you a device and then disable it on a calendar date of its choosing, did you actually own the thing.

the answer in 2016 turned out to be no. revolv was small enough that the brick affected only a few thousand households, but it was a clean case to point at when arguing about iot trust. you could not handwave around it. nest had not gone bankrupt or lost the source code. nest had just decided.

~ what got buried with it ~

the lifetime-subscription line did not survive 2016 as a marketing phrase. you can still find it on launch-era pages of small hardware startups, but every smart-home company after revolv started writing service-term language with more lawyering in it. the discourse about whether iot devices should keep working on local network after the cloud dies started here, and it has not really moved since. devices still get bricked. people still complain.

~ the long tail ~

tony fadell left nest in june 2016, about six weeks after the revolv brick date. nest got folded back into google in 2018. by the time most consumers learned what revolv was, the company that had bought and killed it was itself in the process of being absorbed into the corporate structure that originally bought nest. the puck sits in a drawer somewhere doing nothing on purpose.

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