I noticed an email from Google in my Spam folder this evening (copied, by someone else, here) stating that the Works with Nest API is shutting down on August 31. That’s the API that makes my Nest work with HomeKit, via the homebridge-nest plugin. It is yet another mildly upsetting thing Google is doing that involves killing a product that some people use.

I have had a Nest thermostat for years—well before Google even owned Nest. It is the only smart thermostat that I know of that will work in my house, because I do not have a common wire (which carries low-voltage power) in my heating and air conditioning system, and have no easy access to power near the Nest itself. (The Nest handles that situation just fine, but the other products I have researched, such as the Ecobee, would not.)

Overall, the Nest is OK. Its most important feature for me is that can be set via Wifi. The Nest application, however, is slow to load, buggy, and, if anything, has gotten worse over the years as Nest has added support for its other, non-thermostat products. It often forces me to log in again to my Google account (which is a multi-step process), and does not integrate with Siri or the iOS Control Center. Homebridge solved all those software limitations for me, but was dependent on this developer API that is now going away.

I hope that Google will provide a new API that I can use with Homebridge going forward, but at this point, I doubt that they will. On the plus side, I guess I can unplug the Raspberry Pi I have been running on.