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Logitech To Shut Down 'Service and Support' For Harmony Link Devices In 2018 (arstechnica.com)
Logitech recently informed customers that it will be discontinuing service for its popular Harmony Link remote system, which allows users to control home theater and sound equipment from a mobile app. "Customers received an email explaining that Logitech will 'discontinue service and support' for the Harmony Link as of March 16, 2018, adding that Harmony Link devices 'will no longer function after this date,'" reports Ars Technica. From the report: While Logitech is offering a one-time, 35-percent discount on its Harmony Hub to affected customers that are out of warranty, that's not enough for Harmony Link users who are expressing their dissatisfaction on Logitech support forums and Reddit. Users have not experienced major problems with the Harmony Link system that would indicate they are approaching end of life. Harmony Link customers do not pay a subscription or service fee to use the device, either. The only reason provided comes from a Logitech employee with the username Logi_WillWong, who explains in a response post from September 8, 2017 that Logitech will not be renewing a "technology certificate license" that expires in March. No details were provided about how this certificate license allows the Harmony Link to function, but it appears that without it, those devices will not work as promised. "The certificate will not be renewed as we are focusing resources on our current app-based remote, the Harmony Hub," Logi_WillWong added, which seems to indicate that the shutting down of the Harmony Link system is a way to get more customers on the newer Harmony Hub system.
Better get used to it. It's the future!
Quick search shows someone made a FOSS app to handle them: https://github.com/jaymzh/conc...
They are also apparently filtering "class action lawsuit" on their message boards to "**************" and being generally scummy.
Don't buy "cloud" products, people.
Intentionally pissing off your customers in a bid to convince them to buy more shit from you is one hell of a business strategy. Let me know how it works out for sales and (what's left of) your reputation.
I have a few of their mice and keyboards, and they're pretty good devices. I don't own one of their remotes.
Judging from this fiasco, I probably won't be buying ANY of their products in the future, even if one functions perfectly without the net.
You didn't read the thing you linked to. To wit:
Logitech stops website, users of concordance are just as bereft as everyone else.
In fact, you can't really start using concordance before you signed up through the windows-only logitech "app" because you can't do that directly through the website, or at least I couldn't, last time I tried. It just bitched about my browser.
Want to use your dishwasher because it still runs fine after 10 years? Well, that 'Smart Device' might not work any more because the manufacturer wants you to buy their newest model instead or wants you to sign up for some paid subscription service that you don't want or need. They just won't send some 'certificate' that allows the dishwasher to keep working past its 'due date'. Same for your fridge, your TV, your security camera, your stove, your sprinkling system, your ....
which seems to indicate that the shutting down of the Harmony Link system is a way to get more customers on the newer Harmony Hub system
Do they really think their customers are that gullible ?
How many are gonna give Logitech the middle finger over this, after all, fool me once etc etc.
And not just destroying the goodwill of existing customers, potential customers will see this and say "fuck this company" and spend their $$$ elsewhere.
All it does is put someone else in control of *your data and devices*. If you don't have an option of service providers and ideally running your own "cloud" I wouldn't buy it. I also wouldn't buy it if the sources aren't available. If you aren't in control of your device someone else is.
If this is a way to get more customers to move to the new product, I think they shot themselves in the foot. Nobody in their right mind would buy yet another product that Logitech can end-of-life on them remotely (at least not in the near term). Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me? Bueller?
Anyone with a little bit of thought would have known this was going to happen.
These companies only make money by selling you more stuff. and the best way to do that is make the old stuff redundant
I was seriously thinking of buying a Logitech Harmony remote to replace my old Philips remote, but now it's clear that I will not be buying any Logitech products ever in the future. So does anyone know of any good universal remotes?
You basically had to hand-program every last fucking button OTHER than power. And even then it didn't work a lot of the time.
And do to any modifications you had to plug it back into your computer...
Complete waste of money.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
We only have ourselves to blame.
Microsoft, Logitech and may other manufacturers KEEP proving that they can and will artificially shorten the life of even expensive products only a few years in, yet people just keep mindlessly buying products containing (often otherwise unnecessarily) nanny-net technology. Our buying patterns are just encouraging said manufacturers to keep getting worse with the blatant abuse on every product iteration.
We still need to learn as a society to look for, and prefer buying functionally equivalent devices that do not have any unnecessary internet connectivity, because its already freaking obvious that manufacturers already feel free to use that as an attack vector to totally abuse us.
"This is cloud appliancing: Better get used to it. It's the future!"
I agree, it's cloudy thinking by Logitech managers. Saves Logitech how much money? Then subtract the damage to Logitech's reputation. The loss, I'm guessing, is in the tens of millions.
"We designed and sold you this thing that completely relies on an online service we don't want to pay for any more, so in a few months it will stop working altogether. But hey, why not buy our new thing whose design is exactly the same!"
shut down a cloud based service, forcing all your customers who paid for the products that depend on it to buy something else.
Offer them a discount on your new cloud based service
Rinse
Repeat
AUUUUUUUUUUUUGH....[WHUMP].
Repeat after me, don't buy devices that need to phone home, EVER.
for relying on someone else's service to regulate their home's temperature. Apparently all these upset users didn't bother to think through what might happen if the service, or Logitch, went away.
"You mean they can stop offering this service? How dare they! I have my free app."
Logitech has a history of this behavior. It did the same thing to its old Squeezebox product line, dropping hardware support and moving one of its remaining products (the Radio) to new software they thought would sell better (UE Smart Radio). It didn't. Fortunately, the original software was not as entangled with the Logitech-hosted service as the Harmony remotes, and both the server and client software are open source as well. So now there's ongoing support for the software, and other companies are making audio devices that are compatible with it. My setup continues to work just fine years after Logitech bailed. And my newest Squeezebox device is a RaspberryPi.
But I did research the software side of the Squeezebox product line before I originally purchased, expecting that there was a very good probability that the devices that I bought would possibly far outlast Logitech's stomach for supporting their devices (typically 5 years for consumer products). And it was the availability of open source software that clinched my decision to go with the product. One must really think twice when buying a consumer product with software in it, and thrice if that software depends on a cloud service or even regular updates.
Even otherwise simple standalone devices that have a settable timezone are exciting again, with the New England states beginning to consider dropping twice-a-year DST related changes. Can you update the software's timezone table when jurisdictions make these kinds of changes?
shutting down of the Harmony Link system is a way to get more customers on the newer Harmony Hub system
That seems a strange idea: brick your product, and expect customer to trust you again and buy a new one.
I have never used anything but Logitech's "Marble Mouse" trackball since it first came on the market decades ago. Well, it seems the 64-bit drivers don't offer all the functionality of older ones. I tried contacting them about it, and was basically told to get lost.
It looks like my experience with them was just an early indicator of what was to come. Logitech has chosen a customer service model, and it's not one I want to be part of. So when the time came a couple of months ago to replace my main computer's sound system, I walked right past the Logitech options. My next trackball will probably be a Kensington.
Based on what I'm reading here, it looks like I made the right choice. I might not be a major corporation, but every device in my house (at the moment) has a Logitech pointing device attached to it. Two of them have Logitech keyboards. One has a Logitech sound system. I was a long-term loyal customer who would never have felt the need to look elsewhere.
That was then. This is now.
Logitech is dead to me.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I also wouldn't buy it if the sources aren't available.
How's life without any technology?
I agree about the idea of needing to control your own things as much as possible, but realistically you have a lot of technology that you don't have the source for. If you really are sticking to that, you aren't using any computer (you may have the source to the OS, but I doubt you have the source to what's running on the chips, or to the chips themselves which is just as important) You aren't using a car built in the past 20 years (they all have software, and I don't know of any manufacturer that publishes full sources) You don't have a TV, DVD player, gaming system, etc built in the past 10-20 years as they also all have at least some closed source software.
You can try to pretend you're living with full control, but the reality is that you're likely not that far different from most people who willingly run all sorts of stuff they have no source code for.
So tell me again why "internet enabled" is a consumer-friendly feature for anything other than a computer you use you access the internet?
The good guys, at least for now.
"The odds of new customers heeding [corrected] this warning never to use Logitech products ever again is minuscule, ..."
It seems to me it was very self-destructive for Logitech to do something that caused there to be a story on Slashdot about bad management at Logitech.
I think most Slashdot readers don't realize how many people read Slashdot. Each one of those readers has family and friends who sometimes ask for advice.
Some Slashdot readers buy products for sale at stores or online.
adding that Harmony Link devices 'will no longer function after this date,'"
Well fuck you too Logitech.
A lot of companies and consumers alike haven't figured it out yet - any time you have an internet-enabled device you have to keep supporting it (pay for servers), and patching at least the security holes. All that costs money. People buy products and expect them to last 5-10 years or longer, that is one hell of a support burden! I work in software and security. A 10 year old product is all but forgotten, the engineers who wrote the code are all gone, nobody knows how to maintain it, and most of all, the company is getting absolutely no revenue from the product, so management has zero reasons to commit any resources to maintain it. I've heard people expressing their displeasure of at Microsoft because they bought Office 2010 and can't connect Outlook 2010 securely to a gmail account today because it lacks some newer protocol support (ok, there is a hotfix, but you have to look for it and it's not officially supported) - I've tried explaining it to them but they don't understand it and firmly believe that if they paid for it once, they are entitled to it working forever. Consumers don't get that internet-enabled means you have to keep it up to date, which means it's a subscription service no matter what, whether you pay for it all up front or per month or per year.
All internet enabled products should have a clear planned and committed to End-Of-Life date, which could be extended but never shortened. This would allow consumers to know how long of a life they should expect from a device they are purchasing. There is no such thing as "lifetime" subscription unless it cost a lot of money. SaaS model may actually be the only model that is viable.for internet connected devices.
I got a Harmony Elite remote, with the Hub. What non-cloud alternatives are there?
I currently need to control the following devices:
- NVIDIA Shield TV
- Surround receiver
- Bluray player
- Cable STB
- Wii
- TV
Of course I need to be able to do things like switch modes on the surround receiver (Dolby ProLogic to pure stereo etc), subtitles for the bluray player, tv guide for the STB etc etc. And some of the devices are inside the cabinet, so external IR blasters are a must.
Any smart phone with a ir blaster (like an old galaxy S4) and smart ir remote (the app) can handle most if not all of that.
Used Galaxy S4 50 - 75 dollars.
App 7 dollars
So for less then a hundred dollars you could get a setup WAY more configurable then the harmony crap.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.remotefairy&hl=en
Technology reviews need to do much more than ooh and aah over the latest shiny color on a device. They need to insist that companies provide poof that there is a fair and reasonable EOF solution rather than just pulling the plug. This is coming to bigger ticket items such as cars and houses (furnaces/AC, water heaters, ovens, etc) as they become more and more connected.
a "technology certificate license" is just an obfuscated way of saying "SSL certificate?"
Logitech seems to be *less* evil than other peripheral manufacturers right now, but that doesn't mean they won't do things making up completely bullshit reasons to brick perfectly functional devices.
The porn industry is built upon screwing customers over...repeatedly...and with gusto.
Isn't this why there are kickstarter projects in the first place?
For the past 8 years, I've been using a Universal Remotes MX-350 that I got "free" from the bank when I re-financed. It's annoying to program (all via the remote's buttons) but it works; one-button startup of all the parts that make the TV work (TV, Stereo, TiVo) and it can even learn IR signals from random stuff, like the 4x2 HDMI switcher. And it remembers settings across a battery change, so I haven't even had to consider programming in ages. Since I added the HDMI switcher to my setup, I think.
I have no reason to move to something else, but ... it's 8 years old, and could go toes up at any time.
Logitech was one of the ones I was looking at as a possible replacement, if/when. No more. Stricken off the list.
Any programmable universal remote plus an IR repeater? The technology existed and was cheap decades ago, but somehow it takes a Harmony to do it today. Seriously, this is absolutely basic stuff that any decent remote should be able to handle. I've had a setup almost exactly like that for about a decade, all running off of a single non-cloud remote that was simple to set up (initially a Sony, then later a URC). It doesn't work with Alexa or smartphones though, so I guess it's obsolete...
The Harmony Hub system supports IR/Bluetooth/RF and IP as ways to control your devices. Yes you run the risk of Logitech dropping support for the Hub but that can be true of any device. At least the Hub has a physical remote that works without a connection to a central server.
Examples of devices controlled by my Hub:
Roku -- RF
PS4 -- Bluetooth
Dish Hopper3 -- RF and IP
Sony TV -- IR
A larger issue is some vendors have stopped releasing control codes to third party vendors making it difficult for like Logitech and URC to support the devices.
Try controlling your PS4 or Roku4 with that programmable remote and IR repeater. Ain't going to happen.
More and More entertainment devices are moving towards RF, Bluetooth and IP for control so it will just get worse.
Fuck you and anyone who thinks a smartphone is a replacement for a dedicated remote. It's fine for rare use and backup, but you can go fuck yourself if you think it's good enough for a daily driver. You don't belong in this conversation.
Smart phones are no replacement for a remote. Need the tactile feedback.
So can you point to one which can control the Wii and isn't a pain to configure? I'm genuinely curious.
Obviously it'll need to support activities (that's the whole point) and have plenty of buttons to map to different actions (like switching "sound mode" on the receiver as mentioned).
My Roku 3 came with a BT remote but still has an IR receiver. Did that change with newer generations? I thought they'd still keep it for compatibility.
Though the Roku has an Ethernet control port, so something like a Pi could translate those IR codes to something more useful to the Roku.