A couple of weeks back, we discussed the implosion of startup company Embodied and the resulting bricking of its $800 “emotional support” robots designed for children. Like many other stories about IoT-type products, the post focused on how these robots would cease functioning as designed once the backend support infrastructure for the shuttered business was shut down. As often happens with stories like this, there were several comments pointing out that the company could publish its source code and allow an open source community to pick up the slack here, so that at least these robots wouldn’t become $800 paperweights.
But what doesn’t typically happen in these stories is seeing a company actually make the effort to do exactly that. But that seems to be what Embodied is planning, with the company announcing an update and a plan to all the open source community to build its own backend software for the devices.
Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared a document via a LinkedIn blog post today saying that people who used to be part of Embodied’s technical team are developing a “potential” and open source way to keep Moxies running. The document reads:
“This initiative involves developing a local server application (‘OpenMoxie’) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers.”
The notice says that after releasing OpenMoxie, Embodied plans to release “all necessary code and documentation” for developers and users.
The company is also pushing a final update to the devices that will allow them to support the OpenMoxie setup.
Now, all of this certainly isn’t a perfect solution. If people miss getting the update, their robots will still end being bricks. There is no committment from anyone at all that the open-sourced code and OpenMoxie are going to be dutifully maintained. And who knows what the quality of OpenMoxie will be compared with what the company itself had been providing.
Still, this isn’t an ideal solution for parents who invested in an emotional support toy for their kid and may not have the know-how or time to keep it alive after Embodied closes. While Embodied is doing better than other firms that have bricked or otherwise changed smart device capabilities after release, it remains a disappointing and possibly illegal trend among tech companies pushing products only to alter their functionality or stop supporting their software after taking people’s money.
But at least Embodied is trying to do something about all of this. As the quote above notes, that’s a far cry from what has happened in plenty of other cases, where customers simply get cut off from the functionality of the thing they thought they bought, without any real concern from the companies doing the cutting.
As I said in the previous post, the better solution in the long run would be some sort of consumer protection laws. While we wait for that to probably never come to be, however, this is at least a good step in the right direction by the folks at Embodied.
