A few days ago, Logitech announced in a less formal forum post that it had ended the long-running Harmony universal remote line. The text has been written for a while. The last major Harmony version was released about two years ago, Is an expensive idiot. But for the dedicated high-fidelity user community who has loved these gadgets for nearly 20 years, this is still a blow.
As the market has been moving towards simpler Roku-style remotes and voice controls, the end of the “Harmony” series may not be surprising, but it does raise some key questions. Since the remote control relies on Logitech’s software and services to work with newer devices, and for some more advanced models, it interacts with smart home technology, so how long will it take at least until some of its functions stop working? After Logitech can no longer sell any remote controls, how long will Logitech continue to support it?
According to the post announcing the termination of Harmony hardware, Logitech is still committed to providing support. “There will be no impact with existing Harmony customers. We plan to continue to provide service and support,” Logitech representative said, Although they use forum handles. The existing guarantee will be honored, and the FAQ stated that the company will “continue to update the Harmony desktop software and the Harmony app for Android/iOS”. The support team and documentation will remain in place. The compatible Harmony remote will continue to be used with Google Assistant / Home and Amazon Alexa.
But how long will it last? Logitech expressed with pleading corporate sincerity that its goal is to “keep the service running while the customer uses it.”
This means that, given the dedication of many diehard Harmony fans, it will always be. Even allowing Logitech to benefit from the suspicion that its service record has not necessarily been worthy of the past few years is an impossible task. At some point in the future (hopefully at least a few years apart), the remaining number of Harmony users will be small enough that Logitech believes it is necessary to stop spending money to keep its hardware running. Just look at the Harmony ExpressFor example, only a year after its debut, it basically lost all functions.
Eventually, for at least some people who are still using them, at least some of the connected functions of these remotes will stop working. Without wishing to sound like Nostradamus, it would be inevitable to announce that Logitech’s Harmony server will be shut down on a certain date.
Logitech released its Harmony software as open source, which may be the best result, and it allows the most enthusiastic part of the community to roll over their own software updates and improvements.Logitech has used open source software before, and Maintain a Wiki for products that depend on it, But its global code repository Seems very frustrated. As far as I know, Logitech has not yet released the source code of all its discontinued products. Since Harmony software is still of high value in a certain utopian corporate sense, the possibility of this happening seems very small.