Weber Kills June Oven's Cloud, Leaving $1,495 Ovens Dumb

Weber shut down June Oven's app and cloud services this week, turning a beloved AI smart oven into an ordinary, unsupported toaster.

The June Oven, the $1,495 smart countertop oven built by former Apple engineers with a built-in scale, camera and AI food recognition, went dark this past Tuesday. Weber, which bought the company in January 2021 and stopped making the ovens in 2022, shut off the app and cloud services, leaving owners with a sleek-looking ordinary oven. There will be no app control, no software updates, and no new AI food recognition. Users can still use it as an oven, but there is no support or parts, and a factory reset could permanently brick it. According to The Verge, Weber told the outlet it considered open-sourcing the technology but decided against it because June's IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.

June's shutdown is not an isolated failure — The Verge reports it joins a depressingly long list of connected products killed in just the last two years, including the Nest Secure, early Nest Thermostats, Belkin's WeMo line, Neato's robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, Logitech's Pop buttons, Bose's SoundTouch speakers and Sengled's smart bulbs. The Tech Buzz frames June's death as a hard economics lesson: the former Apple engineers who built it learned that making intelligent appliances is easier than making them profitable, with premium manufacturing costs, ongoing software development and cloud infrastructure draining margins. What makes this one particularly stinging, the outlet notes, is that June actually delivered on its promises most of the time.

The silver lining, if you can call it that, is that most of these gadgets degrade rather than die outright. The Verge notes June and Brava will still work as ovens, and Nest Thermostats can still control heating and cooling just like the $30 plastic wall warts they replaced. But the remote access, voice control, updates and other smart features owners actually bought the devices for are gone, and some — like Nest Secure — are now pure e-waste. Rescues are rare but do happen: Insteon users bought the company and resurrected it in 2022, Bose open-sourced its SoundTouch API, and Pebble's founder revived the smartwatch after the Rebble alliance kept it on life support. June co-founder Matt Van Horn said on X that he tried to keep the servers online but to no avail.

For owners of zombie devices, The Verge points to Home Assistant, the open-source platform that has become the default refuge for the smart home undead when enterprising users figure out how to connect a headless corpse to it. Engadget reports that you don't even need dedicated hardware to try it — a dusty old laptop can run Home Assistant in a virtual machine with just 2GB of RAM and two virtual CPUs, though a swollen or damaged laptop battery should be removed before running a machine around the clock. The platform supports integrations for popular services including Philips Hue, Google Nest, Ring, Sonos and Ecobee, and some integrations run locally, bypassing company servers entirely.

The Verge argues three things need to happen to stop the smart home from burning more users: consumer protections, manufacturer safeguards, and buyer self-defense. Consumer Reports is pushing for legislation requiring manufacturers to push a local API to a device before killing its cloud — essentially what Bose did with SoundTouch. The Verge also endorses Stacey Higginbotham's advice that manufacturers should 'design for death from day one,' or at least plan to pay for the funeral. Amazon refunded Halo buyers in the 12 months before killing the band, Google offered Nest Secure customers free ADT replacements, and Vorwerk promised Neato owners five years of support before truncating it to two. The Matter standard, plus Zigbee, Z-Wave, Thread and Bluetooth, is designed to keep devices functional regardless of a maker's fate.

The Verge's buying advice is unchanged by June's death: make sure any smart home device offers local control, has physical buttons or a direct remote, and can operate offline. Cloud-connected features can add real value, but any feature reliant on a server could one day die — in The Verge's words, a gadget that only talks to the cloud is already halfway in the grave. The Tech Buzz adds that the future of smart appliances may belong to giants like Samsung, which are integrating similar smart cooking features into traditional ovens with the scale and service networks startups lack. Follow-the-money details from The Verge add context: Brava's collapse traced to a private-equity deal at parent Middleby, and Nest Secure's death began shortly after Google invested $450 million in ADT.