Stringify

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

~ the obit ~

Stringify was founded in 2014 in Los Gatos by Dave Evans and Mike Yurochko, and took almost two years to ship anything. The first iOS app arrived in December 2015 into a market that already had IFTTT, which had trained everybody to think of home automation as a sentence with one blank in it. If this, then that. Stringify's bet was that anybody who owned more than about six connected devices had already hit the ceiling of that sentence and wanted something closer to a wiring diagram.

What it gave them were Flows: a canvas where you dragged in Things, which could be a light or a phone's location, and connected them with branches and delays and conditions that all had to resolve before anything fired. It worked with north of five hundred products by the end. It was harder to learn than its competitor and the people who learned it were loud about never going back, which is the usual shape of a tool with a real ceiling.

Almost nothing on that compatibility list was sold in Turkey. It ran through Nest and Ring and a US cable company's own hardware, in houses wired for an American utility market. I build computer vision that has to run on small flying machines, so the engineering arguments are familiar enough, since they are the same arguments about which trigger fires first and what the system does when one radio drops out. The house being automated was just somebody else's house, in a country where the thermostat is on the internet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cable company years ~

Comcast bought Stringify quietly in the fall of 2017 and the deal only surfaced in the trade press that October. The logic read well at the time: Comcast was selling Xfinity Home to millions of subscribers and had no automation engine worth the name, and here was a small team that had built one and won a CES innovation award for it.

In April 2018 the app relaunched with a new look and deeper hooks into Comcast's own services. That was the high point and also the tell. The engine was being folded into a product sold by a cable company, and a standalone consumer app with a passionate minority of power users is an awkward thing for a cable company to keep paying for.

~ the last June ~

On 8 April 2019 the users got an email. "After nearly five years of transforming how people automate their connected lives, I'm sorry to inform you that we are beginning the process of deactivating the Stringify app." It pointed people at IFTTT and webCoRE on the way out. The app came off both stores the same week, the service kept running through June, and then Comcast deleted everything in it.

What makes this one strange is the website. The archive has stringify.com serving its full marketing site at about thirty-three kilobytes on 4 July 2019, days after the service was already off, with no banner, no notice and no goodbye anywhere in it. The product had been dead for a week and the front door was still selling it. The domain stopped answering entirely some time later and now returns nothing at all on either scheme.

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