About six and a half years ago, we bought a Neato robot vacuum. Relative to Roomba, at the time, this other company had better reviews and probably a better product. At the very least, having the brush out in a square front meant it did corners right. And it was pretty cool. It mapped out your house, and then you could draw lines on the map for places it shouldn't go. This was especially useful for us, because upstairs we have railings that look down into the living room, and the machine sees through them. Without the lines, it would have to interrogate (read: run into) all of that iron, which isn't ideal. It even stored upstairs and downstairs floor plans.
In more recent years, we kind of stopped using it. We mostly bought it for downstairs, because that's where the dust kitties (mostly Poe's fur balls) get pretty bad across the hardwood floor. But in practice, it was a pain in the ass, because you have to pick up all of the chairs, of which there are 12 (kitchen, counter, dining room). We end up mostly spot cleaning with a battery operated Dyson. But it's still pretty useful upstairs, on carpet. We weren't using it there either, but it started beeping all of the time, because the battery was toast. I bought an inexpensive (and larger capacity) replacement.
But you know what else is toast? Neato. They went out of business last year. I put in the new battery, and it seemed like nothing I did would make it work. It just blinked lights at me in a non-productive fashion, with the app telling me there was a non-descript problem. Neato, indeed. I eventually learned that a certain button/bumper combination would restore it to some backup firmware, so I did that. It worked again, but it was an older version that didn't use the map and the "no go" lines. It also meant re-pairing it to our account, which doesn't work on newer versions of Android, but fortunately does on iOS. I found a guy online who figured out how to put a new non-expired certificate into a firmware package, and then you could use a USB drive to update it. Of course, to do this, I needed to get an obscure adapter to push USB-A to an old micro USB or whatever it was called, because it's old. Finally, I got it to its previous state, only with the new battery.
The problem is, the vacuum doesn't really work without its cloud counterpart. That's where the account lives that bridges a phone app to the machine, and where it stores your floor plans. The parent company says it will support that infrastructure for at least five years, but at that point, it will become a door stop. Consider that other household machines can last indefinitely. That Dyson vacuum I bought in 2005 is still with me, and aside from replacing the brush, works like a champ.
This is a wider issue with all kinds of gadgets now. The light switches and plugs in my house depend on a service run by TP-Link. They're based in Singapore, but global and huge, so that one is probably safe. The smart speakers are from Amazon and Google, and the former complains about the unprofitable nature of it, and the latter is known to just turn products off. The video doorbell is also now Amazon. It could all go away.
In most cases, loss of connectivity is inconvenient, but not the end of the world. However, the vacuum will absolutely be useless at some point, and that's a bummer. If there were better standards (emphasizing "better," because it's not that there aren't any), I could imagine that you could do all of these kinds of things with a cheap box you put on your network at home, but that's not a thing.
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