Weber shut down app and cloud services for the June Oven on Tuesday, leaving users with a basic toaster oven. The shutdown highlights a growing wave of abandoned connected home devices, joining products like Nest Secure and WeMo in the smart home graveyard.
A decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers launched the June Oven, a $1,495 connected appliance featuring restaurant-grade heating elements, a built-in scale, a camera, and artificial intelligence capable of recognizing a chicken breast and cooking it to perfection. While expensive at launch, the device built a devoted following that grew when the company later released a more modestly priced model, according to reporting by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy.
That support ended abruptly. Weber, which acquired June in January 2021 and stopped manufacturing the ovens in 2022, disabled the app and cloud services. The shutdown leaves owners with a sleek-looking toaster oven devoid of remote app control, software updates, and AI food recognition features.
The Growing Smart Home Graveyard
The June Oven joins a long list of connected products that have lost their digital lifelines over the past two years. The casualty list includes Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin’s WeMo line, Neato robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech Pop buttons, Bose SoundTouch speakers, and Sengled smart bulbs.
While some discontinued gadgets maintain partial functionality through local protocols like Zigbee, Thread, Apple’s HomeKit, or integrations with Home Assistant, many others exist in a zombie state. Devices like the June and Brava still function as basic ovens, and abandoned Nest Thermostats can still control heating and cooling like a standard wall thermostat. However, remote access, voice control, and software updates are gone permanently, and products like Nest Secure have become complete electronic waste.
Resurrection Efforts and Platform Pressures
Rescues for orphaned hardware remain rare, though exceptions exist. When the smart lighting platform Insteon shut down in 2022, users purchased the company to resurrect it. Bose reversed an earlier decision to sunset its hardware by open-sourcing its SoundTouch API, and the founder of Pebble revived that iconic smartwatch through the Rebble alliance. June co-founder Matt Van Horn posted on X that he attempted to keep the oven’s servers running, but those efforts were unsuccessful.
Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
The wave of closures stems from the aging out of early smart home startups, many of which operated for over a decade. Larger parent companies that acquired these startups often found the ongoing cost of maintaining cloud servers outweighed initial enthusiasm for the hardware. A similar fate may await Level Lock, a smart lock startup founded by former Apple engineers that was acquired by Assa Abloy, a company that subsequently laid off most of the team.
Industry Standards and Consumer Protections
Preventing connected devices from turning into paperweights requires systemic changes across the industry. Consumer Reports is currently pushing for internet-of-things legislation that would compel manufacturers to release a local API before terminating cloud services, allowing abandoned hardware to connect to open-source platforms like Home Assistant.
Hardware makers can future-proof products by designing them to operate without cloud connectivity. Incorporating physical buttons and supporting local standards like Matter, Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread, and Bluetooth ensures devices retain core functions even if the original manufacturer goes out of business.
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