Things continue to look bleak for the original robot vacuum maker. iRobot’s third-quarter results, released last week, show that revenue is down and “well below our internal expectations due to continuing market headwinds, ongoing production delays, and unforeseen shipping disruptions,” said Gary Cohen, iRobot CEO, in a press release.
This meant they had to spend more cash and are now down to under $25 million. “At this time, the Company has no sources upon which it can draw for additional capital,” said Cohen.
The Roomba manufacturer has been struggling for several years in the face of increased competition from Chinese manufacturers. A sale to Amazon in 2022 looked to be its lifeline; however, regulatory scrutiny scuppered the deal, and the company was left in further turmoil. It laid off over 30 percent of its staff, lost its founder and CEO, Colin Angle, and was left with substantial debt as a result of the fallout.
This year, iRobot launched an entirely new line of robot vacuums, ostensibly to better compete with companies like Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame, adding lidar navigation to its line for the first time (over VSLAM). The new models look significantly different from the original Roombas and more like their competitors. They also use a different app with fewer features, but added some new hardware features the previous models lacked, including spinning mop pads and a roller mop.
In a regulatory filing earlier this month, the company warned it may be forced to seek bankruptcy protection following the breakdown of advanced negotiations with a potential buyer, and if it couldn’t secure additional funding.
Roomba customers are understandably concerned about the impact these current financial troubles might have on their home cleaning robots.
Earlier this month, fellow American robot vacuum manufacturer Neato, which shut down in 2023, pulled the plug on its cloud services, leaving its robots unable to communicate with the Neato app. However, the vacuums can still be controlled manually.
Similarly, if iRobot goes out of business and its cloud shuts down, most Roombas should still continue to work in offline mode — pressing the physical button on the robot to start, stop, and dock it. However, they likely wouldn’t be controllable via the app for features like scheduling or specific room cleaning, or via voice commands. This potential dilemma just further highlights that cloud-connected devices should be enhanced by connectivity, not reliant on it.
Customers shouldn’t need to be concerned because the company going down should not brick your PHYSICAL PRODUCTS
And yet, here we are
I’ve got one, and it works well enough when offline.
If not, I could set up Home Assistant and self-host it.
It’s a shame, as Mozilla gave iRobot one of the better privacy ratings. That’s the only reason I allowed it in my house to begin with.
My lil neato bot from 2017/2018ish makes a perimeter map around my place each time it deploys, then makes back and forth sweeps. It’s got a built in weekly timer by the quarter hour to schedule sweeps. It beeps at me when its bin is full. Why do robot vacuums need the internet?
@BlindFrog @Feathercrown Same. I buy broken ones of the same model off ebay and use them for parts when needed, because I don’t want a newer vacuum with wifi. It *would* be nice to move off of NiMH batteries, but they’re good enough for now.
But, clearly, a Google Home or Amazon Alexa needs cloud connectivity to function. And short of Stop Killing Games regulations forcing companies to release software to keep purchases functional after server shutdowns, there’s going to be no alternative when they shut down the servers.
But where do we draw the line?
A smart fridge should obviously keep working without cloud connectivity, since cloud features aren’t relevant to its core functionality.
A
spywarehouse-scanning vacuum robot, on the other hand, that stores video of your entire house on web servers “to map your home” may not have the processing power to model the home based on itssurveillancevideo recordings. So, is it reasonable, then, that these break when servers go offline?Without any regulations, the answer is just “consumers can go fuck themselves”, which clearly isn’t a good answer.
He said Home Assistant not Google home.
You mean the person who posted 3 hours after me?
Oh look, another example of a product that worked fine without internet connectivity and was improved by adding extra bullshit you don’t actually need that then gets worse when those features can’t function properly because their server is offline.
We got a basic roomba 650 (the one that crashes into stuff and randomly cleans) like 10 years ago and it still works fine (well, as well as it ever worked which wasn’t great), you program the time and day of the week with physical buttons, and leave it alone.
Yeah. I’ve got an 870 that’s still cleaning. It gets stuck under furniture and needs to be rescued at least once a week, and last week it lost its
assdustbin somehow mid clean, but it’s still kicking.I printed special little stilts to raise one of our tables the 10mm extra it needed to be able to go under without getting wedged. It still tries fornicating with the cat tree - a different problem to solve.
Never lost it’s ass though, one to look out for there.
Lmao
I would watch this screen version of The Brave Little Toaster 2.
So instead of a janitor you become a robot technician. No thanks.
A fair assesment. Except that you have to (and should be) cleaning the upright vacuum as well. Vacuum fires are no joke.
My vacuum doesn’t get lost under the furniture.
Your vacuum doesn’t go under furniture more than likely so to clean under there you quit being a janitor to become a furniture mover?
I guess it’s turtles all the way down.
The cat crawling under there dust mops regularly.
Probably.
If only there was such a thing like bluetooth to connect mobile apps to local devices
Mobile apps bit rot pretty quickly when they stop updating them. A web UI would be better. A server or internet connection is not needed, a web UI can be hosted directly on the device.
An accessible documented API would be better. A standardized one for all vacuums would be best.
If one came with Valetudo pre-installed (or installation was officially supported), I would be very interested.
What does this even mean?
That means apps tend to stop working if the developers don’t keep updating them. Mobile operating systems much, much worse backwards compatibility than windows. If the device hosts its own website instead of using an app, it will most likely work fine decades from now without any updates.
Mobile apps that aren’t supported lose functionality quicker then webUI alternatives (since web standards stick around longer I’d guess)
it means android api changes, google play restrictions and removals
This potential dilemma just further highlights that cloud-connected devices should be enhanced by connectivity, not reliant on it.
This should be everyone’s takeaway.
The problem isn’t the company possibly going out of business, its the loss of online service nerfing the device that is the real issue.
We could have consumer protection laws that mandate when a service that a consumer product relies on is no longer being served by the company, they must release the source code as FOSS for the community to carry it on if they so chose. This could apply to video game servers as well as robot vacuums.
We could, if someone cared to put in the effort to make that happen.
I hope they open source it before dying (if they do end up going under)
There is at least one Robo vac that does not rely on the cloud, and personally I can’t imagine feeling comfortable with a robovac being cloud connected for no reason.
How did they squander being the name in autonomous vacuum devices…? It’s kinda baffling tbh.
Well, Chinese manufactures cloned the design and came in well under price, took the Chinese market, then improved the product and challenged iRobot globally.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
A big part of it is also that in the grand scheme of things, roombas are kind of gimmicky because they don’t really do the time consuming parts of cleaning, like moving furniture or dusting baseboards. The value proposition of paying more for different tiers of branded mediocrity just isn’t there.
How did they squander being the name in autonomous vacuum devices…?
Letting a picture of a customer using the bathroom leak onto Facebook cannot have helped.
Really? It’s not a mystery. China. For the past 5+ years they have had better and cheaper vacuums. Meanwhile innovation has been at a standstill with irobot for the past decade.
This is why IoT isn’t sustainable. If you don’t have total control you’re fucked.
Why proprietary cloud-based IoT isn’t sustainable.
Definitely. I use home assistant but I found a lot of things require enabling integrations with other platforms. They’re bricks if that platform decides they are.
Chinese robot cleaners are much better and cheaper than iRobot. No wonder iRobot is failing.
It would be easy enough to force vendors to make the URL the device connects to, configurable and to publish the API the device is using. Two minuscule changes that can prolong the life of devices by decades.
To be fair, many roombas have a mini DIN connector somewhere, which opens up the possibility for external control - what I plan to do when mine stops working due to server shutdown. However, getting replacement parts will get more and more tricky as time goes by.
I just had to through out a mostly functional airfryer because the drawer rail disintegrated and the replacement part is no longer manufactured. The oldest one I could get was a “new” version with more plastic and a slightly bigger size, so it didn’t fit by about 5%.
It really should be illegal, there is no logical reason for 500 slightly different models and inoperability of basic functions (drawers, APIs, …) aside from malignant greed and planet destruction.
Gods, I fucking hate this so much. I’ve got a ninja blender that the lid seal is broken, and the lid alone is like 50-70% of the cost of a whole new unit. It’s ridiculous how impossible it is to find replacement parts for simple things anymore.
This is why I have a 3D printer. I make all kinds of seals, gaskets, o-rings, usually better than original.
How do you 3d print a rubber gasket/seal?
You print molds and make it out of RTV.
TPU works fairly well depending on the application.
I wouldn’t rely on it for high temperature (above 150C) or high pressure/vacuum applications, but for most household applications it’ll hold up fine.
That would make the husk of the company truly worthless, and I’m not sure private equity will allow that.
For 99% of everything, if I don’t have 100% control over a physical thing in my possession, I refuse to buy it.
The exceptions are things like my phone because it’s a necessary device these days and there aren’t a lot of options for something not locked down to all hell. Though it looks like that could change eventually with a Linux phone.
Kitchen appliances, washing machines, cars, and beds do not need to be connected to the web. Hell even most of the smart features they claim require the network to function could be done without connectivity. Just program that shit into the god damn device instead of outsourcing the workload to an offsite server farm.
The exceptions are things like my phone because it’s a necessary device these days and there aren’t a lot of options for something not locked down to all hell.
Graphene is good enough, IMO.
The real problem is that getting to 99% is damn near a full-time job and the capitalist cartel actively punishes it (by only offering owner control in ‘commercial-grade’ products at huge markup, or not manufacturing such things at all and forcing you to DIY).
It’s unreasonable to expect any but the most dedicated (read: stubborn) people like us to be able to handle it; the only viable solution for the masses is to wrestle back control of the government and end regulatory capture of the FTC etc.
Though it looks like that could change eventually with a Linux phone.
SailfishOS is mostly daily drivable, depends on which Android apps you need (there’s a compatibility layer to run Android apps on it), with bank apps it’s often a problem.
Banking apps are something that need to be working before most people will even be able to attempt to switch to a linux phone. If the options are call and be on hold for at least an hour when I probably am working got to a physical location also open only when I’m working or using a banking app that’s available 24/7 the last one is the only viable option for many people.
I can log on to my bank through a website
Well, that’s why you’ll have to try out. Or ask someone to at least try whether it opens, the apps mostly either fail on start because they require a Google certified Android, or they don’t fail at all.
Online banking can frequently be handled via the web site on mobile phones.
If it doesn’t work when the cloud is down, it’s not your thing. Don’t buy it. 8sleep is only the most recent example.
Not to support this cloud-only system, but I used to own an iR (several, actually) and they can clean the entire space, pause, and cancel/dock with physical buttons.
Though it loses a large chunk of its smarts without a connection. No floor plan retention, no room selection, no 1 pass/2 pass, no knowledge about no-go lines and zones, no adjustable suction based on room…
But there’s no real reason for that. Losing the smarts. It’s just artificial to achieve lower bom.
Catastrophe because we gave up the broom and mop. Oh no.
I have a roomba, it is called “me with a vacuum”
While singing “I want to break free” at full blast.
Wearing a dress and moustache.
The entire problem is that automobiles have become an accepted housing option, and Roombas don’t operate well in a vehicular environment, thus drastically cutting into their sale.
Truly the Kodak of this generation
Kodak said “we don’t believe digital photography will take over” and iRobot is like “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
They fucked up by making their robots last seemingly forever, due to the fact they spy on you and get stuck every 15 mins so you never want to turn them on.
