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Weber turns the June Oven into a plain toaster oven by switching off its cloud
Weber has switched off the app and cloud behind the June Oven, removing the smart features from an oven that launched at $1,495. Weber kept the code because June's IP sits inside its Weber Connect platform, so owners have no official way to get those features back.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- June co-founder Matt Van Horn said on X that he had tried to keep the servers online, without success.
- The Verge counts eight other connected products cut off in the last two years, among them Nest Secure, Belkin's WeMo line, Neato's robot vacuums and Sengled's bulbs.
- A few of those survived through local protocols such as Zigbee, Thread and HomeKit or a Home Assistant integration, while most were left half-working.
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Why it matters
- constraint Once a startup's device code is folded into an acquirer's live platform, releasing it for a community rescue gets harder, so the chance to make a device maintainable by outsiders mostly ends at the sale.
- decision Hardware teams have to decide at design time whether the core function runs without their servers, because a company that has written a product off has little reason to keep paying for them.
- precedent If Consumer Reports gets its proposed rule requiring a local API before a cloud shutdown, a shutdown plan becomes a budgeted engineering cost for every connected product.
A June owner can still cook dinner tonight. The risk is the day the oven needs a factory reset. Weber offers no support or parts, and Jennifer Pattison Tuohy writes in The Verge that a reset "could be the nail in the coffin" [4].
The June launched at $1,495 with a built-in scale, a camera and software that could recognise a chicken breast and cook it [2]. After the shutdown, owners lose app control, software updates and new food recognition. The oven itself still works [4].
Tuohy's explanation for how products end up here is about who pays. A decade ago a cloud server was cheaper to build than a local hub, she writes. But servers keep costing money, and once a company decides to shut a product down, the reasons to keep paying fade quickly [11]. Most of the early smart home startups have since been bought by bigger companies [15]. Weber stopped making the ovens about a year after it bought June [14].
Teams plan around the service, but the hardware outlives it. Most of these gadgets degrade instead of dying, Tuohy notes. A Nest Thermostat still runs the heating and cooling like the $30 plastic wall wart it replaced, and a Neato still vacuums [9]. Nest Secure did not get that far and is now e-waste [9].
Rescues are rare, according to Tuohy [17]. The ones she lists came from users or from a published interface. When the smart lighting platform Insteon shut down in 2022, its users bought the company and brought it back. Bose reversed course and open-sourced its SoundTouch API [10].
I think Weber's answer on open source was settled well before the shutdown, at the point June's code became part of Weber Connect [5]. Once a device's software lives inside a platform the new owner still runs, publishing it means publishing parts of that platform. Level Lock is in a similar spot. Assa Abloy bought the lock company and fired most of the team, and the product is still running for now [12].
For a team shipping connected hardware, the decision fits in a 2x2. One axis is whether the product's core job works with your servers off. The other is whether anyone outside the company can reach it locally, through a standard protocol or a published local API. The corner to design for has both, so an owner or a Home Assistant developer can keep the device running after you stop. Part of the forcing function is legal. Ship the local API under a license kept separate from the platform code, so a later buyer's platform cannot hold it back. On that grid, June sits in the corner where the oven still cooks and no one outside Weber has a supported way to reach the smart features [4][5].
What to watch
- Whether a Home Assistant developer finds a way to connect June ovens locally, the kind of rescue Tuohy says happens but rarely.
- Whether Consumer Reports' local-API proposal picks up a sponsor in any legislature.
- What Assa Abloy decides about Level Lock's app and servers after cutting most of the team.