Downgrades
Devices that got worse after people had already bought them — a firmware update that added an account requirement, a server shutdown, a feature moved behind a subscription, a vendor revoking access it had previously granted.
This is the page the whole project exists to fill, and it is deliberately kept narrow. Routine additions to the catalog live on Updates so that anything appearing here is worth your attention.
Since we started watching
| 2026-09-05 | vendor | Sonos Ray | vendor_risk raised 0 -> 3 when Sonos was added to the ledger with three dated incidents. The tier is unchanged and was never affected: REJECT rests on the account being mandatory at setup, which is a fact about the device, not about the vendor's conduct. |
Before we started watching
These happened before this catalogue existed. We did not catch them — we recorded them, from public reporting — and they are kept separate so nothing here implies we were watching when we were not. They are on this page because they are precisely what it is about, and because the pattern is the reason to care about the rest of the site.
| 2025-11 | Withings | An r/withings open letter (357 upvotes, 150+ comments) collects owner reports of a BPM Connect losing sync capability and a ScanWatch losing SpO2/heart features, and of users locked out of already-purchased devices until new in-app data-sharing terms were accepted. A targeted search for independent reporting of a specific, dated removal found none — coverage in the same period describes features being ADDED by firmware update. The allegation is consistent and multi-user but rests on one community source. B source |
| 2025-03 | HP Inc. | Class action settled with court approval. No customer payout and no admission of wrongdoing; owners of 21 named models gained the option to decline Dynamic Security firmware, and to downgrade firmware on those models only. B source |
| 2025-03 | Brother Industries | Right-to-repair advocates alleged firmware updates degraded third-party toner function, including colour registration on colour models. Brother denies its updates block third-party consumables and attributes the reports to variation in third-party toner quality. Not independently established either way. B source |
| 2025-03 | Brother Industries | Brother's public denial, reported alongside the user complaints. B source |
| 2024-05 | Sonos | The 7 May app rewrite shipped without features that worked on already-sold speakers the day before: alarms and sleep timers, local music library search and management, playlist editing, SonosNet Wi-Fi settings, and much of the accessibility support blind users relied on. The old app could not be kept. The CEO apologised, put the fixes on a public Trello board, and estimated $20-30M to repair; annual revenue fell 4% and he left the company in January 2025. B source |
| 2024-03 | Ring (Amazon) | From 29 March 2024, Home and Away modes — and the Live View customisation tied to them — required a Ring Protect subscription on video doorbells and cameras, for existing owners as well as new buyers. Ring Alarm owners who bought before that date were grandfathered; doorbell and camera owners were not. B source |
| 2024 | Ring (Amazon) | The entry Ring plan rose to $4.99/month or $49.99/year, reported as a 43% increase over the pre-March-2024 price. B source |
| 2023-11 | Chamberlain Group (myQ, LiftMaster) | Blocked all third-party API access to myQ, breaking working integrations on devices customers already owned. Home Assistant removed its myQ integration in the 2023.12 release. Chamberlain's stated reason was preventing 'unauthorized usage' of its ecosystem. B source |
| 2023 | Chamberlain Group (myQ, LiftMaster) | Ended support for Google Assistant. B source |
| 2023 | eufy (Anker Innovations) | Class action filed alleging eufy security cameras secretly uploaded user images and live footage to the cloud contrary to its local-storage marketing. B source |
| 2022-12 | eufy (Anker Innovations) | Camera streams were shown to be retrievable in VLC with no encryption and no authentication, contradicting eufy's marketing. Anker admitted the streams were not encrypted as claimed and committed to moving all cameras to WebRTC with AES/RSA encryption. B source |
| 2022-11 | eufy (Anker Innovations) | Security researcher Paul Moore showed a eufy Doorbell Dual uploading face thumbnails and user information to eufy's cloud while the device was configured for local storage only. Anker initially denied the behaviour, then conceded images were uploaded 'for notification purposes'. B source |
| 2022 | Chamberlain Group (myQ, LiftMaster) | Discontinued the official Apple HomeKit integration for myQ. B source |
| 2020-11 | HP Inc. | A firmware update enabled Dynamic Security on some already-sold printer models, blocking non-HP cartridges. Customers were not notified the update would impede function and had no way to opt out. B source |
| 2020-01 | Sonos | Announced that a set of 'legacy' products would stop receiving software updates and new features from May 2020. The units kept playing, so this is the weakest of the three on the loss-of-function axis — but it partitioned existing systems, because a legacy device sharing a household system constrained what the rest of that system could do. B source |
| 2019-12 | Sonos | The Trade Up programme's 'Recycle Mode' permanently deactivated working speakers in exchange for 30% off a new one: confirming it in the app started a 21-day countdown after which the unit was bricked with no way to recover it, and recyclers could not resell or reuse the hardware. Eligible units included the Connect, Connect:Amp, ZP80/90/100/120 and Play:5 (Gen 1). Opt-in rather than forced — which is the honest qualification — but it destroyed functioning hardware by design. Withdrawn in March 2020 after sustained criticism; the discount now validates a serial number instead, and units already set to recycle could not be reversed. B source |
| 2018-2022 | HP Inc. | Earlier Dynamic Security settlements: $1.5M in California (2018), AUD$50 per affected customer in Australia (2018), EUR10M in Italy (2020), $1.35M in Europe (2022). B source |
Vendor conduct is scored in the ledger, separately from any device's tier. A company that has done this before can do it again, but it does not change what the hardware in front of you does today.