Smart home company Hive stops selling home security devices to focus on thermostats and smart lighting; existing devices will stop working starting in 2023
Jon Porter / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Hive began in 2015 as a thermostat play — the £249 Hive 2 came with roadmapped sensors, plugs, and bulbs — then broadened into home security. The new announcement reverses that expansion: security hardware exits the lineup entirely, and devices customers already own go dark starting in 2023.
The move lands on familiar ground. Nest's decision to disable the Revolv hub it had acquired, bricking that hardware outright, established the template for cloud-tethered smart home products dying when a parent company changes strategy.
First-order effects
- Existing Hive security device owners are the immediate losers: hardware they bought stops working from 2023, with no successor product line to migrate to within the brand.
- Hive concentrates its roadmap and retail shelf space on thermostats and smart lighting — the categories where it started and presumably retains its strongest position.
Second-order effects
- Every smart home vendor selling cloud-dependent security hardware now faces harder buyer questions about longevity, and Hive's retreat hands rivals like Nest an opening in UK security — even as Google's own plan to end support for first- and second-gen Nest thermostats undercuts any 'we last longer' pitch.
- The churn compounds at the platform layer too: Google already shut down Android Things, the OS built for exactly these devices, so abandoned endpoints increasingly lack even a community path to repurposing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Revolv bricked, Android Things gone, Hive security orphaned — smart home purchasing shifts toward products with local control or explicit support commitments, and vendors that can credibly promise multi-year lifecycles gain a durable trust advantage over feature-broad ones.
- Category consolidation follows: security becomes a specialist's market rather than an add-on line for generalist smart home brands, mirroring how each major player has been pruning back to its core.
The trend: Smart home is consolidating around fewer product lines per vendor while cloud-dependent devices keep getting orphaned when strategy shifts, making support lifespan a buying criterion alongside features.