I don’t think market saturation was RainMachine’s specific problem, but you’re right in general. Our capitalist dystopia demands infinite growth, and planned obsolescence is part of that.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to, whatever the consumer product in question. I have a few tools that belonged to my grandfather and they still work just fine, partially because there’s no plastic to crack and the bearings all accept either oil or grease.

You’re probably also right that selling user data to advertisers is now a reliable source of recurring revenue, which all the MBA C-suite people want at any cost, even the alienation of their customers. This timeline sucks.

What’s an MRC?

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I chose a RainMachine irrigation controller over other options, because they specifically marketed their cloud-independent firmware design. It was vindicated a couple years ago when they started going defunct and grasped for recurring revenue by billing for proxied remote access, but even then they emphasized that everything else would continue to function without their servers.

The onus is on the consumer to reward cloud-independent designs like this. While it has been sad to see RainMachine’s collapse, my device indeed just keeps working. Hopefully it isn’t ultimately killed by firmware or app security vulnerabilities since it’s now thoroughly unmaintained.