Amazon is bricking primary feature on $160 Echo device after 1 year

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org to News@lemmy.world – 389 points – Amazon is bricking primary feature on $160 Echo device after 1 year
arstechnica.com

It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.

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Man, Amazon is giving Google a run for their money on enshittification and product cancellation.

This is more hilarious because the spy device not only cost more for the ability to show you photos, but it ALSO had a subscription fee to do so on top of that.

I'm completely befuddled as to what the hell they were thinking, and why they think replacing family pictures with more ads is somehow going to make people do anything other than Ron Swanson these stupid things into the nearest dumpster.

So I bought one of Spotify's Car Things when they were flushing them after realizing nobody knew fuck all about them.

The device itself works alright for it's purpose, but is basically just a fancy way to change tracks or answer your phone. There's no GPS or messaging integration that you'd get with CarPlay. It doesn't even tell the time. Still, it works and is useful.

A few months ago, Spotify sent out emails that, as of December, they will be bricking all of them and to dispose of them via whatever recycling service you have.

Pretty shitty that we've entered an era where companies can just destroy something you paid for because they want to... There need to be laws against this.

In case you didn’t know, you can contact support. D get a credit to your Spotify subscription, usually in the amount that you paid for the Car Thing. You’ll just need your receipt.

Yes. And also be careful when you're shopping.

We have an older Echo Show in the kitchen. I hate it. It’s genuinely one of the single most ill-conceived, user-unfriendly products I’ve ever experienced. It’s straight up dog shit.

My wife originally picked it up because Amazon were flogging them for something like £30 as a loss-leader. Figured it would make a useful bedside clock and smart speaker in one. It’s a shitty clock, and absolutely fucking useless on the bedside because it keeps flashing shit up in the dark. You can’t load any photos on to it, so you’re stuck looking at whatever artwork/“tips”/ads it wants to show you.

I don’t understand how Amazon created a device that looks like a little picture frame, that would be an ideal bedside clock, and apparently at no point did they consider that people might want to use it like that.

We since got a Google thing that’s essentially the same device (free with an energy tariff), and y’know, Google did a good job with that thing. Just sits in the bedroom being a clock and smart speaker, dimming nicely when the lights are out, never advertising shit at us.

I use it as a Bluetooth speaker, which also sucks because it’ll randomly refuse to disconnect from my phone even though I did it through my phone’s settings. It’ll be disconnected, then I’ll be sat in the lounge and I’ll hear it reconnect, like some kind of cunt.

And they’ve programmed it to talk ALL THE FUCKING TIME. “NOW CONNECTED TO YOUR PHONE”. Yes, I fucking know it is, I just told you to do that.

It is legitimately the worst bit of tech I’ve ever used, and I’ve used a Virgin Media cable TV box.

There really should be a Bluetooth setting for "do not auto connect me." My car does this too, I wear bluetooth headphones a lot and for short to medium car trips it's not worth it to have to connect and put my headphones back only to pull them back out and reconnect after I arrive, I'd rather just listen to headphones the whole time, but my car waits until I've turned on the car and pulled out of the driveway to auto connect against my wishes.

Sadly I don't think bluetooth was really designed for how interconnected it has become. I'm still annoyed bluetooth multi-point is so broken :/, rather than interviewing multiple audio sources to the same speaker it just force mutes one when the other comes and at least for my momentum 4s I don't see an option to set the priority or suppress this.

Bluetooth is definitely due for an overhaul.

The way multiple connections are managed at the moment is woefully inadequate (when the devices even support it).

Hah mine too. Playing a game on my laptop. Pull up my phone. Browse to a webpage. My headphones “OH YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO THE AD ON THIS PAGE ON YOUR PHONE OK SURE RIGHT NOW ONLY AD ONLY AD”

Fuuuuckkkk

I'm really sorry you have to share a home with that shitty device. Maybe break a window, mess up the place, and throw it away and pretend it was the only item stolen.

All of which is to say, once I finally get around to picking up a half way reasonable Bluetooth speaker for the kitchen I’m putting a fucking hammer through that fucking show. Useless lump of crap.

A $2/mo subscription for a fucking screensaver?!

Digital photo frame as a service. Wow thanks big tech, so innovative, I can ask it about the weather.

"Now fetching the weather, but first a word from our sponsors!"

Some people really are that dumb. I guess the silver lining is that there weren't enough dumb people to keep this dumb service alive.

In September of 2023, Amazon announced the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition. It looked just like the regular Echo Show 8 smart display/speaker but cost $10 more. Why? Because of its ability to show photos on the home screen for as long as you want—if you signed up for a $2 monthly subscription to Amazon's PhotosPlus. Now, about a year after releasing the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, Amazon is announcing that it's discontinuing PhotosPlus. That means Echo Show 8 Photos Edition users will be forced to see ads instead of their beloved pics.

i'm sorry but if you were enough of a rube to sign up for a $2/mo subscription for that then this might be darwinistic capitalism

A lot of people really have a hard time parsing what they’re buying with digital products and I think it’s unfair to expect them to compete with international mega corporations that love to surprise folks with gated featured/subscriptions as you go “caveat emptor.”

Oh look, more e-waste.

Companies should be forced to pay per pound of their shit that people throw away before a certain time

time to open fraud complaints with your credit card company

Now you're talkin'.

I've noticed that threatening to do that works extremely well with Amazon. they recently started charging $8 for a UPS pickup when you do a return, and all I have to do is tell them that I will initiate a fraud complaint if they actually charge me for it and they just refund me

Just as a little tip, in the US if you switch your Echo's language to US-CAN it displays way less ads :)

Those things have ads? Why would you intentionally buy an advertisement billboard for your house?

It's a toss up, but it pretty much only shows just photo/link ads. The one that they've really been pushing recently is that Disney platformer game on the Switch for some reason.

Yea but you still willingly put a little billboard in your house and you even paid them to do it 🤷‍♂️

I love paying a faceless corporation that hates humans to remind me everyday that capitalism is killing me!

Sorry, what I meant was that the ads are extremely easy to ignore, and you can immediately swipe through them if you want to. I use mine exclusively as an alarm clock anyways.

Ah, similar trick works with some viruses. If you set the keyboard layout or timezone to Russian, the ransomware will not encrypt your files.

This is a good reason not to buy a kindle, or another one if you have one already. If they're doing this they'll just as easily steal the books I bought when they randomly decide to.

I only buy authors that refuse to DRM their work.

Agreed. Its really annoying since i love the Paperwhite. But I just don't trust Amazon as a company.

There was a bunch of noise over a book that they rescinded from Kindles a couple / few years ago. I don't recall the details, but it made headlines.

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You shouldn't need a fucking subscription to display your photos on your hardware.

The subscription is for the 25gb cloud storage space... Of course a 64gb USB Stick would be cheaper and doesn't rely on an online connection.

The description of that device and subscription is so fucking stupid I'm not even mad. If you fell for it that hard, you deserve whatever they throw at you.

"You're stupid so you deserve to be screwed over by massive corporations". What a shitty take.

Crap like this is why I stopped buying things.

Here's to hoping the development of a good local replacement from Home Assistant. Like the Lenovo teams screen thing.

mhm, is there a way to root the echo show?

I kinda doubt it, since Fire TVs can't be. Then again, FireOS is just a remux of Android. Edit: it seems like Echo Shows can in fact be rooted, but it's a difficult process. Side-loading seems to be the easier option in this case. XDA Forums link: https://xdaforums.com/f/amazon-echo.6148/

oh nice, thanks for the link. I gonna scourge that forum now.

Unless the ads are being served by the same server as the photos, this is probably trivial to block using a Pi-Hole or other type of network-level ad-blocker.

I do wonder if it's unable to pull up ads, if it just reverts back to showing photos. Would love to get one secondhand to test it out. Sure as shit never going to pay for one.

Huh, I never knew this existed, or I might have bought a couple.

I’ve been thinking of digital picture frames both for myself, as my kids go off to college, and my Mom, as her grandkids go to college. However I’ve never been happy with how easy they are to manage

  • I want mine to just work, and incorporate new pictures as I take them
  • my Mom is not very tech savvy, so it really has to just work regardless of what she does, plus I need to be able to update it remotely

I see a variety of digital pictures frames and see how they try to make updating them easy, but I don’t see why they’re not completely automatic.

My phone automatically detects faces as I take pictures: I have a kids album that’s automatically updated whenever I take a photo of my kids. That’s how easy I want it

A Google nest is that easy.

I’ve heard it works for pretty well for androids, but I’m in the Apple ecosystem so it requires extra steps

Don't worry the rest of the echoes Will be on the chopping block next. The product doesn't make them enough money.

I have a couple of 8 in and a 5-in show who's sole purpose in life is to display whoever just rang my Eufy doorbell.

I can't say that I've ever noticed an ad on them I'm sure they're there I just don't spend any time looking at them.

I've stopped using them for shopping lists. Other than occasionally asking what the weather is today or the kids asking them how to spell a word, we hardly use them.

I use my smartwatch for timers. I do have a couple of smart bulbs in the bedroom and use it to turn off the lights but again I never look at it.

Should be allowed to return products at a full refund when they do something like this, and for an additional 25% value in a gift card for the inconvenience.

an additional 25% value in a gift card for the inconvenience.

Plus countering inflation, of the company reaps rewards from sitting on that cash in between.