Works with Nest

» see nest.com/works-with-nest as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 23 June 2014, six months after Google paid $3.2 billion for Nest Labs, Nest opened its developer program and called it Works with Nest. The pitch was that a thermostat knows two useful facts, whether the house is warm and whether anybody is home, and other companies should be allowed to read them. Mercedes-Benz would tell the thermostat you were driving back, and LIFX would flash the bulbs red when the smoke alarm went off.

By early 2015 Nest said more than 5,000 developers were at some stage of building against it. That number matters less than what it bought: a small open interface, run by a hardware company, that the rest of the smart home industry could plan around. IFTTT recipes, Alexa skills, alarm panels, garage door openers and a long tail of home automation projects all reached the thermostat the same way.

Then Google put the hardware brand back inside Google, and everything that had been built on the outside of it stopped being welcome.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the announcement ~

On 7 May 2019 at I/O, Google folded Nest into itself as Google Nest and said Works with Nest would stop accepting new connections on 31 August 2019. Everyone with a Nest account would migrate to a Google account. Integrations would be rebuilt as Works with Google Assistant, on Google's terms, with Google running the security review and deciding what data a partner could see.

The reaction was not the usual grumbling. People had spent years wiring houses around this API, and much of that work was not replaceable by an Assistant voice command: an automation that turns the heating down when the alarm arms has no equivalent in "hey Google". Nine days later the Nest product director posted a note that opened with "we hear you" and conceded the main point. Existing connections would continue to work. Nobody would be forced to shut down a Nest account.

That reversal is the reason this grave has two dates on it. The program was announced dead in 2019 and then kept breathing for four more years, accepting nothing new, receiving no fixes, with everyone who depended on it knowing exactly how the story ended.

~ the part turkey never saw ~

None of this reached me as a product decision, because Nest never launched here. Turkish homes run on kombi units, a gas boiler on the kitchen wall with a room thermostat wired to it, and the thermostat that came with the boiler was whatever the installer had in the van. The smart home in Turkey through the 2010s was a phone app from the boiler manufacturer, if that. From here the interesting part was the pattern underneath it: a company buys the thing your house depends on, and the terms you agreed to stop being the terms you live under.

Nest had already given everyone a preview of that in May 2016, when it switched off the servers for the Revolv hub it had acquired and turned a $300 device into a piece of plastic. That one took a few thousand hubs with it. This one reached every company that had built a product against the API.

~ what got buried with it ~

The replacement arrived slowly. Device Access opened its console in 2021, charging individual developers a one-time $5 fee for the privilege of talking to a thermostat they already owned, with a narrower set of data than the old API gave away. Many of the integrations from 2014 never came back in any form.

On 29 September 2023 the remaining Works with Nest connections went inactive for good. By then the ecosystem had spent four years either rewriting or giving up, and the announcement barely registered. Google ended Dropcam and Nest Secure support the following spring, which closed the last of what it had bought in 2014 and then spent a decade taking apart.

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