Google Ends Support for Early Nest Thermostats
Google’s oldest smart thermostats have an expiration date. The company has announced that the first and second generation Nest Learning Thermostats will lose support in October 2025, disabling most of the connected features. Google is offering some compensation for anyone still using these devices, but there’s no Google upgrade for European users. Google is also discontinuing its only European model, and it’s not planning to release another.
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The devices will still work as a regular dumb thermostat to control temperature, and scheduling will remain accessible from the thermostat’s screen.
The third-generation thermostat is still supported but came out less than 10 years ago. Not a great lifetime for what I think people see as a buy-it-and-forget-about-it product. I never got around to investigating installing Nest thermostats and lost interest after a terrible experience with a Nest Cam. Google’s Wi-Fi routers have been great, though.
they’ll say if i want smart feature i can cough up a few hundred dollars and begin the enshittfication process again.
Previously:
- Synology Hard Drive Locking
- Fitbit Charge 6 and Google Pixel Watch 2
- The Enshittification of All Things
- Nest Cam Waking in the Night
Update (2025-05-05): Tim Hardwick:
This decision follows Google’s recent discontinuation of other Nest products amid job cuts in its platform and devices division. Google is no longer making new Nest Protect Smoke & CO alarms and is ending sales of the Nest x Yale Lock.
Despite the upcoming end-of-life, the thermostats have exceeded Google’s standard five-year support commitment, with some approaching 15 years of service by the cutoff date. Still, many Nest owners will be disappointed with the limited lifetime of a device they probably didn’t expect to replace anytime soon.
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I’ve got one that’s losing net support. They say they’re going to send $100+ (can’t recall exactly) coupons so you can buy a supported device.
I was initially pretty disappointed, but honestly I’ve never found a good afternoon schedule once I started working from home (though I do like it turning things low overnight) — and the on-device scheduler isn’t impossible to use if I really wanted it. The “smart” learning was an absolute waste; I’d turned that off years ago.
My real question is why has the Nest app been trying so daggum hard to make me sign up for Google Home (about every other day; I’ve resisted so far) if they were going to dump me immediately?
uggggghhhh.
I bought one of the first gen before many of us (or maybe just I) realized the consequences of hardware being so closely tied up with software/services.
That sucks.
Any suggestions for a thermostat with intuitive interface, but not tied to "services".
This sucks, and 10 years is not long enough for something like this.
nooooow that said, I’m on a 3rd gen nest and if it got bricked tomorrow I’d still go out and buy the latest model. My nest thermostat has saved me literal hundreds of dollars over the past 7 years, and that includes the initial device cost. The convenience and utility of a smart thermostat still feels like the most useful of all smart home products.
I do wish they’d let these run locally without needing the authentication layer, but Google’s a pretty small company so I know that would be a stretch of their resources.
Buying "smart" devices just doesn't seem so smart. It's basically inviting in all of the complexity, dark patterns, poor UX design, obtuse intractable errors, and skeezy data harvesting that we get with modern computers into every other facet of your life.
@Bri: well said. Aside from a robovac which I'd replace with a regular vacuum in a heartbeat there are no smart devices in my household. Being dependent on and giving other parties such control over my home and by extension wallet (here's $100 to upgrade to the latest model) seems insane to me.
“ Google’s Wi-Fi routers have been great, though.”
Reminds me that I should ewaste the Google WiFi router that was gonna get all those magical security updates and have all the amazing antennas…until they forgot to laugh at me to my face for falling for their dalliance with yet another hardware gambit.
Google has a history of dropping things that they lose interest in. That's not exactly the case here, and 10 years is a pretty good run for most tech products. It just slams up against what most people think of as the life expectancy of a thermostat.
Nest products seemed really cool early on. Once Google bought them though, I could no longer see myself buying one.
As an alternative, Ecobee thermostats seem to get high marks. My latest HVAC system came with its own "smart" thermostat, which isn't as smart as it should be. When I get too annoyed with that, I'll probably get an Ecobee to replace it.
