I haven’t used the app in a while and opened it and saw this… Well never buying Anova again
But hey at least they gave me a coupon that expired two months ago.
Imagine seeing that message and buying another product from them.
“It’s time to artificially create waste. Don’t worry, you won’t see this message again. Our new cookers are designed to not last 10 years.”
100%. They’ve just guaranteed that the sous vide unit that I have now is the last Anova product I will ever buy.
Ung
(Don’t) hope they did their math right and the “well, it’s just $2/mo” crowd is large enough to offset the principled crowd
That notice doesn’t even say there is a $2/mo option. App just won’t work at all.
Imagine Goodyear 500 tires!..for just 30 bucks a month you too can get the most inexpensive tires of all. 500 mile tires!. After 500 miles they don’t spin or hold air so we recommend setting your odometer properly.
I can’t imagine why these things even need an app.
You have to set the thing up with water and all, just hit the buttons on the device.
I have a different brand, but I can see the value. The interface on the small screen on the device I have is very clumsy. Took me a while to figure it out, and I’m very tech savvy. I can see a mobile app being useful, also for notifications so I don’t independently have to set timers.
Also as a former mobile dev, mobile apps take maintenance to keep up with OS changes over time. And developers are expensive.
What I imagine happened is that they probably outsourced their app development to a 3rd party, because they make hardware, not software. That contract probably expired, including their ongoing support agreement, and they’ve probably negotiated an hourly rate for support on-demand going forward, maybe with a different 3rd party dev.
So in all likelihood, they’re just passing the cost for ongoing maintenance on an EOL model to the customer.
However, that looks absolutely insane from a consumer standpoint.
I don’t know their Financials, but they may not be big enough to just swallow the cost for brand PR if they’re not selling at a volume and profit margin to be able lose money on old products.
This is why, even as a dev that used to work in the mobile and IOT space, I tend to purchase dumb devices if there are good options. Smart devices get dumb as soon as the shine has dulled.
My partner has an Anovo affected by this and he knows the details better than me, but IIRC the app allows you to set times to change temps or things like that. The device still works without the app, but you lose the convenience factor of being able to monitor or make changes at a distance.
The one and only time I used the app it lost connectivity and left my chuck roast in lukewarm water for who knows how long. Tossed it because I didn’t want to kill my family with food poisoning. It’s nice if you have a WIFI connected device, so you can put something on the counter in an ice water bath in the morning with the sous vide wand in there and flip it on before you leave work in the afternoon. Also seeing that the water has maintained an appropriate temp during a long cook is nice too. It’s a niche case use, but that’s why it’s nice to have it connected.
It’s kinda nice to just search what you are making, click cook, and all the settings are preloaded and the device starts. The manual interface is clunky.
LOL they absolutely don’t and mine does not have one or I never would have bought it. I don’t buy anything that requires an app to function.
Size and easy to clean (and waterproof) is one, I have a ChefSteps Joule which is app control only, but it is much easier to clean, and much smaller than my old Anova (fits in a drawer with other crap)
Granted it is more annoying to use the app than the controls, but the trade off for us was worth it, if not for everyone.
They could just use capacitive touch for controls, inferior to buttons but just as cleanable. There’s little reason to not have both options
Capacitive touch controls around anything with the potential to generate steam or condensation is an awful idea. At best they just don’t work with damp fingers, at worst the buttons short or randomly activate because of the water that builds up.
I have one, and didn’t know it had an app.
That’s bullshit
Actively encouraging people to toss perfectly good hardware to fuel their subscription bullshit… and these guys weren’t even recently bought by a VC firm or anything?
They were bought by Electrolux in 2017, and have been enshittifying ever since. Cheaper, lower quality parts, etc. They’re just profiting from the brand as they turn it to shit. Never buy their products.
I would see if there’s a way to disable updates for that app.
“supporting them”. I understand bug fixes and the inevitable support end-of-life cycle, etc; I really do. But the reasoning behind abandoning an old, yet in-use product is because you want them to buy a newer alternative.
Do you need the apk to use it at all? Or is it just a little perk to go along with it?
Hopefully, someone hacks the apk so it just keeps working.
I bought one of these years ago, and took a look at it. The app let’s you remote control the stick and pick recipes that will autoset the temps. That’s about it. The stick has buttons on it, and it’s not like you can have it add the food to the water bath remotely. It’d pretty easy to knock in the temp at the heater while you’re there
Sous vide is a “set and forget” cooking method like a crockpot. You can walk away and leave the thing running long past the minimum time and have no issues because the whole point is it takes food to an exact temp and no further. So even any alerting “temp reached” it may do now isn’t really useful.
This feels like a “pick the carcass” attempt to make some money at all. I expect the company is probably in a bad state if this is the game they are playing.
Yeah. I’ve used sous vide for a long time myself. Sounds like the whole apk could be replaced with asking the internet what temp to cook X at, and then setting your phones timer for cook time.
Unrelated but how would you rate sous vide cooking? I am tempted for a bunch of reasons but I’m worried it’ll be just another kitchen appliance that I rarely use.
For steaks, they’re excellent. About the only thing I haven’t been able to do over a good steakhouse restaurant is an extremely crisply outer layer. There’s some techniques there that I haven’t learned yet that might fix that. Everything else about the juiciness and taste is easily the same or better.
You’re basically taking all the art of out it that you would have to learn to become a top steak grill master, and replacing it with precision.
Make sure you dry your steak extremely well, and then basically shallow fry it in a cast iron or other heavy pan. Don’t need to deep fry it, but if you really want it as crispy, you want a real layer of oil.
One strength of sous vide is you can get even normal steaks much more tender than otherwise possible, just by extending your sous vide time up to two or three hours.
If you’re not committed, you don’t actually need an appliance for it, have had great results with a Dutch oven and a programmable BBQ thermometer monitoring the water temp. One of my burners goes really low so just a matter of adjusting to keep in range. You don’t get forced circulation (get some natural circulation though) and it’s not set and forget, but you can do with stuff you probably already have on hand. Done with heavy freezer bags before I was gifted a vacuum sealer.
I was using it for steaks and it’s been great - sous vide then cast iron pan - but I moved somewhere where the smoke alarm is extremely sensitive so haven’t used it much lately 😞
There are different type of smoke alarms. Some detect smoke. There are two ways of doing that. Near a kitchen area it’s usually best to get a completely different one that just uses changes in temperature. Though they will only notify you way matter. So highly recommend keeping the existing one and moving that one somewhere else.
Wait
“Our community has literally cooked 100s of millions of times with our app. Unfortunately, each connected cook costs us money.”
The cooker, It’s FUCKING Bluetooth. It doesn’t need to call home, it can’t call home. The App, It has a list of 35 different sous vide recipes that could live on the app. The app has no business calling home, they don’t need a server.
It’s a cooker. Why the hell does it even need bluetooth, let alone an internet connection?
So it can notify you when the water has reached the set temperature or the time you set for cooking is up. Which can be handy. However, I found the BT very weak on my Anova and it would lose connection when I went into my home office a mere 25’ away, so I stopped using it. There’s actually no need for the water to be up to temperature before you put your food in, and food can sit as long as you want; half the point of sous vide is to be able to hold food at temp without overcooking. So you don’t really need the timer either.
I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.
I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.
And if each did cost them money - they’ve been paid when the stupid thing was purchased!
Yeah, it’s a $200 heater. Probably $30 in parts. You can run a small cluster for the profit in a few sales a month.
They need if they were to push firmware updates via the app that are then installed over Bluetooth, like some headphones do. But that should be a free service, and also optional. I don’t really see any groundbreaking functionality added for a device that’s basically a submerged motor with a temperature probe.
It’s a decade old cooking appliance .
What possible firmware updates could it need at this point?
Firmware updates should not cost a subscription fee and could open them up to lawsuits.
Even in that case the app doesn’t need to phone home. It doesn’t even need an internet connection on its own. You’d have to download the update yourself and then use the app to apply the patch, which is less user friendly to not-so-tech-savy users but possible. Just send an email with the necessary information to users who have subscribed to receive these kind of updates.
Temperature Temperature set point Deadband Heater power Time Display temperature Display time
This can literally be handled with two non-microprocessor integrated circuits and $5 in other electronic Lego components.
It doesn’t need firmware. It’s a $200 oversized fish tank heater.
Translation:
“Fuck you for not replacing your perfectly fine and still working 10 year old machine and making our line go up more. We’re gonna do our best to brick it because we want all of your money.”
Fuck capitalism. I will (and have been) doing my absolute to avoid buying any kind of physical device that requires an app to function
I will (and have been) doing my absolute to avoid buying any kind of physical device that requires an app to function
Same. It’s becoming more difficult every day.
And that’s so sad. There are a lot of (mainly Elderly people) who don’t even have a smartphone who now often can’t use the most basic stuff necessary because it needs an app.
A lot of this stuff is only useful if you have money, anyway. And poverty rates among the elderly have been climbing since the Housing Crash of '08
I’ve said this before, I’m going to say it again: people with money spend it to save time.
Managing 2FA, software updates, account signin, device pairing, billing, privacy policy updates, cookie notices… This shit does not save people time. It does the complete opposite.
These products are not built for consumers. These products are purely anticompetitive schemes, propping up crappy business models, trying to cash in on the data harvesting gold rush.
I’ve been screaming this at the top of my lungs for 20 years, and oh my god the “I told you so”'s I get to say now feel SO good.
i mean, I don’t have any friends anymore, so mostly im just calling up people who hate me now and saying “I told you so”, but, like I DID, so, worth.
I mean, not, like, ‘worth’ in the sense that anything in my life works or wasn’t torn apart by my adherence to materialism and avoidance of dark patterns, but, like, you know, feels good for a few minutes when they haven’t changed their number.
These products are not built for consumers.
they’re often built for investors. they are feasible enough products that some people will even buy them, so you get investors. then, the thing is always just “one more issue we need to fix” away from “mass adoption”, “for real this time”… to keep milking the investors as long as possible.
Yeah, I need to start being better about this. It’s a shame because I bought my joule sous vide because I like the simplicity and ability to monitor and program it remotely (helpful when cooking for 5-6h). App stopped working properly and now they’ve been purchased by breville and if I want to use it I need to switch and I’m guessing it won’t be long before they start to drop functionallity or require some sort of subscription. There are things like this where the app is much more than a gimmick. But it sucks to have some company pulling the strings of what you can or can’t do with your own hardware.
water+heat proofing is hard, or I’d suggest a DIY solution.
can’t just root the sous vide?
if I see something requires an app, no matter how good it is otherwise. the product is dead to me. I know it is, effectively, going to break within a year or two.
I have one of these, and I use it just fine without an app fwiw
you never know for sure until you try though, so if it requires an app, it’s dead to me and I don’t trust anything else the company makes.
if it has an API i get very wet very fast.
About two phone changes ago I never reinstalled the anova app.
It’s like pressing the buttons on top of the cooker with extra steps.
yeah there are apps I want on my phone, but if anything says ‘there is an app’ I’m instantly averse.
even the things I do want phone apps for, I have to browse on fdroid because default options are all terrible. basic shit like file browsers and media players in commercial OS’s are just, like, vile and do not function. even if I didn’t care about the endoscopes they try to snake up every orifice, they are deliberately nonfunctional.
That’s fair, but the point I was trying to make was that I have tried and, for the one I’ve got at least, the app isn’t required. I’m not trying to defend them or anything, I just thought it was worth mentioning.
Tbh I’m kinda glad it doesn’t have an API, because I’d end up wasting a lot of time playing with it haha.
see, if it had an API, I could integrate it into an open smart home app, and it would be cool as FUCK.
I’m getting that same way.
Currently trying to chase down some automatic sun shades that don’t need an app to do time-based cycles. Shouldn’t be this hard, but every band wants you to use absolute garbage apps.
if its not open source; it doesn’t exist.
Switchbot (hardware) and home assistant (controlling server) might fit your needs. It still would require an app, but home assistant is self hosted and is a fantastic automation platform. It won’t be as smooth as an all in one setup, but I find the tinkering is half the fun.
I’ve installed so many hardware items that are either “appless” and are controlled by home assistant or home assistant is compatible and replaced the app. Absolutely worth it IMO. I have been able to make a full self hosted/controlled and offline functional smart house.
I mean it is shitty still, but people with an old device and an account already are unaffected, plus the old devices like the one I have is completely operable offline. I’ve not connected it to WiFi except when I first got it to check the app out.
I passed on a lot of the fancier apartment buildings for requiring an app and a cell phone to gain access to your own home. I shouldn’t have to agree to an arbitration/class action waiver to use my own front door, I don’t feel comfortable with management getting a notification on their phone every time I come or go, I don’t like the fact that 20+ listed partner companies have access to sensitive personal data, and I shouldn’t have to wait for maintenance to show up in the middle of the night because I couldn’t make it back home before my personal tracking device died on me.
The sad thing is that most of these locking units cost these apartments hundreds of dollars each on top of a monthly subscription.
management getting a notification
Isn’t that a giant privacy violation? Why does anyone need to know when you come or go?
“…to maintain the safety and security of the building and everyone in it.” - An actual FAQ
Way to make home feel like a prison.
What the actual fuck. In what country do you live?
U.S… Not an actual tracking device, just a cell phone. I usually leave it at home, which would have been impossible to do at many of those buildings.
I will never throw a brick through the headquarters of Anova, nor would I advocate for others doing it.
For those of us on Android, can’t we download the old APK which still talks Bluetooth and just never interact with the web/wifi for these?
The app phones home to access recipes.
Maybe it works without access to the server, but maybe it just refuses to do anything.
Enshittification strikes again. 🤬
I own one of these, and I honestly forgot there was an app. There’s literally no reason for it, outside of the timed-start mode that I never use.
Honestly, the biggest mistake was making this an IoT device to begin with.
Oh ffs… This is the one I have…
And, you know what? The firmware sucks.
You can’t even connect to wifi if you have two AP’s with the same name (which is literally everyone).
I haven’t even installed the app in ages because it’s a PITA and has never worked 100%.
But, they can guarantee my next one won’t be an anova again. There are much cheaper alternatives now
I’d recommend anova brand
Oi bruv, it’s anova kitchin appluiance asking for moy woyfoy passwood.
Damn autocorrect was fighting me on every word lol
deleted by creator
ah they were making a nice and lame pun (anova brand == another brand)
I wish people would stop threatening companies switching to subscription that they’ll lose business. The c-suite know they’ll lose much of the current customer base. They’re banking on the data telling them that the market acceptance of their product is gaining traction with new customers.
That will float them until they tell grandfathered users to go screw themselves and will face all sorts of new charges to use their app as previously established.
This is what happens when you have companies run by MBAs and lawyers. They respond to the data, and as long as the data says any negative responses can be overcome in some other way, they’ll do it. They don’t care about their clientele (or their employees for that matter). They care about the extra millions of dollars they were promised for the degrees they paid for.
Start finding alternate solutions to any product that connects to the internet. Then they can’t spy on you or handcuff a sub fee to their product.
You wouldn’t download a sous vide
someone can just make a cracked version people can sideload
yeah…ummm…no
Guess inkbird are going to get recommended a lot more…
Are they good?
I have an Inkbird & really like it. Significantly less expensive than Annova, offers all of the same features from what I can tell, & it’s never given me any issues.
The app is of course a bit clunky & ultimately unnecessary, but it does actually function as advertised.
I don’t actually own any of their products but the bbq community generally speaks very highly of it. I figure whenever my current SV stick dies (not an ANOVA, it’s a knockoff from Aldi lol), I need a backup so I’ve kept an eye on the market…
I personally think it’s perfectly reasonable for a company to eventually start charging for a service they provide that costs them money to provide. They might bakenin some number of years into the product price, but they can’t keep providing the service for free forever.
It seems like something that should be expected if we do want certain services to be provided and maintained. Heck, I also think that offering a subscription is better than the usual alternative, which is that the company just shuts the service down.
However, the way this is done is almost always slimy and shitty and likely is only going to get solved by regulation.
- It’s incredibly rare that IOT devices NEED cloud integration. Most of the time it really SHOULD just be local-only, or have a local option.
- If they are going to start charging for something to continue to work, unless there was already an explicit agreement that - and when - this would happen, they need to provide an alternative.
- Either documentation or open software for how an alternate cloud - including local - could be used instead.
- That info really should be mandatory to be made available beforehand in case the company shuts down.
- The subscription fee needs to be reasonable.
- Personally, I think $24/year is still far too much, but it’s still WAY more reasonable than some I’ve seen.
Should be a no-brainer.
Part of the problem comes when companies go out of their way to provide a service on their end that could be covered reasonably easily on the consumer’s side of things. Why put a few cents worth of storage in a device and make it locally accessible when you can make it cloud-connected and hosted to turn it into a revenue stream?
Another example, GM has had OnStar for ages. It does the same things your cell phone does, so it’s hard to justify the subscription. Plus Android Auto/Car Play works really well and relies on something you update more often. So naturally, GM revamped their infotainment to do the things you’d have your phone do and got rid of Android Auto/Car Play.
People who made accounts before they start charging will be grandfathered in for free.
OK, cool, that’s also better than normal.
Until that changes, or they shut it down.
Edit: ah, I missed that in the article and everything.
It’s all pure CEO bullshit though, and none of it is real.
It doesn’t cost money to send a Bluetooth signal from your phone to a sous vide. Maybe the WiFi server costs money but it’s their own fault for adding stupid functionality that phones home.
I’ve got one of these and I’m prepared to bet money that almost all of their server costs come down to every recipe in the app just being a link to a web page with lots of photos. https://recipes.anovaculinary.com/
Thing is they needed to factor this j to the cost of selling the device.
It basically costs them nothing to ru the service for this device. If they failed to calculate that as part of the sale price, that’s not the consumers fault.
