Things continue to look bleak for the original robot vacuum maker. iRobot’s third-quarter results, released last week, show that revenue is down and “well below our internal expectations due to continuing market headwinds, ongoing production delays, and unforeseen shipping disruptions,” said Gary Cohen, iRobot CEO, in a press release.
This meant they had to spend more cash and are now down to under $25 million. “At this time, the Company has no sources upon which it can draw for additional capital,” said Cohen.
The Roomba manufacturer has been struggling for several years in the face of increased competition from Chinese manufacturers. A sale to Amazon in 2022 looked to be its lifeline; however, regulatory scrutiny scuppered the deal, and the company was left in further turmoil. It laid off over 30 percent of its staff, lost its founder and CEO, Colin Angle, and was left with substantial debt as a result of the fallout.
This year, iRobot launched an entirely new line of robot vacuums, ostensibly to better compete with companies like Roborock, Ecovacs, and Dreame, adding lidar navigation to its line for the first time (over VSLAM). The new models look significantly different from the original Roombas and more like their competitors. They also use a different app with fewer features, but added some new hardware features the previous models lacked, including spinning mop pads and a roller mop.
In a regulatory filing earlier this month, the company warned it may be forced to seek bankruptcy protection following the breakdown of advanced negotiations with a potential buyer, and if it couldn’t secure additional funding.
Roomba customers are understandably concerned about the impact these current financial troubles might have on their home cleaning robots.
Earlier this month, fellow American robot vacuum manufacturer Neato, which shut down in 2023, pulled the plug on its cloud services, leaving its robots unable to communicate with the Neato app. However, the vacuums can still be controlled manually.
Similarly, if iRobot goes out of business and its cloud shuts down, most Roombas should still continue to work in offline mode — pressing the physical button on the robot to start, stop, and dock it. However, they likely wouldn’t be controllable via the app for features like scheduling or specific room cleaning, or via voice commands. This potential dilemma just further highlights that cloud-connected devices should be enhanced by connectivity, not reliant on it.
How did they squander being the name in autonomous vacuum devices…? It’s kinda baffling tbh.
Well, Chinese manufactures cloned the design and came in well under price, took the Chinese market, then improved the product and challenged iRobot globally.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
I would not say they cloned the design. The first breakthrough for Roborock was the S5, which had LiDAR and a map. Both was not something iRobot had at the time. iRobot simply chose to not innovate in the areas people wanted first. People didn’t like the random cleaning that the roombas did for a long time compared to the structured of almost everybody else.
How did they squander being the name in autonomous vacuum devices…?
Letting a picture of a customer using the bathroom leak onto Facebook cannot have helped.
Really? It’s not a mystery. China. For the past 5+ years they have had better and cheaper vacuums. Meanwhile innovation has been at a standstill with irobot for the past decade.
It would be easy enough to force vendors to make the URL the device connects to, configurable and to publish the API the device is using. Two minuscule changes that can prolong the life of devices by decades.
That would make the husk of the company truly worthless, and I’m not sure private equity will allow that.
To be fair, many roombas have a mini DIN connector somewhere, which opens up the possibility for external control - what I plan to do when mine stops working due to server shutdown. However, getting replacement parts will get more and more tricky as time goes by.
I just had to through out a mostly functional airfryer because the drawer rail disintegrated and the replacement part is no longer manufactured. The oldest one I could get was a “new” version with more plastic and a slightly bigger size, so it didn’t fit by about 5%.
It really should be illegal, there is no logical reason for 500 slightly different models and inoperability of basic functions (drawers, APIs, …) aside from malignant greed and planet destruction.
For anyone interested in owning their vacuum robot check out Valetudo
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to support anything from iRobot. I’m hoping that there will be a jailbreak made available before they go bankrupt, but I doubt it.
Absolutely love Valetudo!
I’ve been eyeballing this, doesn’t seem too difficult for most compatible models either. Might be a little after Christmas project
Idk, the dev seems… hostile. And prevents the project from becoming a community effort. Also:
Feature-parity is a non-goal for Valetudo, and if you’re wondering which features “you might lose”, Valetudo is not for you.
I mean, I do wonder if I will lose features, therefore I guess I should look elsewhere.
It’s all explained here: https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html
The dev has a specific vision and that’s it. If you don’t like it you can use something else.
Just like the dev of Calibre/Kitty. He does things a certain way because that’s the way he likes it. It’s a stupid and shit way, but Calibre has no real competition so I use it 🙂
The dev has a specific vision and that’s it. If you don’t like it you can use something else.
Yes, that’s what I wrote as well.
And prevents the project from becoming a community effort.
No, I am not doing that, because I cannot do that. That is the whole thing with FOSS code.
If there was a community of builders picking it up and doing something community-driven, I could not do anything about it, nor would I want to.
They would be required to not call it Valetudo + not use the logo, so that they cannot coast off the brand and reputation of course - and that I would absolutely expect from anyone -, but other than that anyone can do whatever.
Why this hasn’t happened yet, I cannot say for certain, but my hypothesis is that no one actually wants to put in the work. Likely both because work is work and work is annoying, but also because what exists now just works so what would you even do other than slap another name on it and feel good about yourself.
But putting that aside, I’d like to ask a different question: Why wouldn’t I want that?
If community is nice, friendly, warm and full of heart, why would I oppose that? I am, after all, just like you. A human that would like to have fun, pleasant and nice interactions with other like-minded humans. I, like everyone else, am a social creature that enjoys being seen as a fellow human and member of a group.
So why would I oppose that?
The answer to that might be, that the mental model of “community project” does not actually in reality and execution fit any of what I described right now.
Of course, I cannot and will not rule out that it is just me and that I am the problem, but even if that is the case, then I still need to exist and need space to exist. “Just be normal” just means “stop being you”
It would be quite weird to not allow me to exist within the space I created from nothing from the ground up, wouldn’t it? If even that isn’t a place I would be allowed to be in, then where is?
Holy crap, didn’t expect the creator of Valetudo to be here. Love your style, keep it up
🫡
Valetudo is not a community is on the website.
If your answer to my comment is: “well, you can create your own community, with blackjack and hookers!”, well… There’d be so much to discuss that I don’t think it’s worth it.
And as for the second paragraph, communities aren’t “nice”. They’re communities, made of people, who are all flawed, just like everyone is, in different ways, but manage to make the puzzle of human interaction fit. If all you want is people communicating and behaving in a specific way that you approve of, that’s not a community.
Nobody’s forcing you out of your space and I’ve never proposed it, I just said that I won’t be using your software, we’re both making our choices, hopefully in respect of each other.
Oh look, another example of a product that worked fine without internet connectivity and was improved by adding extra bullshit you don’t actually need that then gets worse when those features can’t function properly because their server is offline.
We got a basic roomba 650 (the one that crashes into stuff and randomly cleans) like 10 years ago and it still works fine (well, as well as it ever worked which wasn’t great), you program the time and day of the week with physical buttons, and leave it alone.
If only there was such a thing like bluetooth to connect mobile apps to local devices
Mobile apps bit rot pretty quickly when they stop updating them. A web UI would be better. A server or internet connection is not needed, a web UI can be hosted directly on the device.
What does this even mean?
That means apps tend to stop working if the developers don’t keep updating them. Mobile operating systems much, much worse backwards compatibility than windows. If the device hosts its own website instead of using an app, it will most likely work fine decades from now without any updates.
it means android api changes, google play restrictions and removals
Mobile apps that aren’t supported lose functionality quicker then webUI alternatives (since web standards stick around longer I’d guess)
An accessible documented API would be better. A standardized one for all vacuums would be best.
Yeah. I’ve got an 870 that’s still cleaning. It gets stuck under furniture and needs to be rescued at least once a week, and last week it lost its
assdustbin somehow mid clean, but it’s still kicking.Lmao
The entire problem is that automobiles have become an accepted housing option, and Roombas don’t operate well in a vehicular environment, thus drastically cutting into their sale.
This vacuuming is brought you by Squarespace…
You can’t set a timer on the thing without internet access?!?
Truly the Kodak of this generation
Kodak said “we don’t believe digital photography will take over” and iRobot is like “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”
They fucked up by making their robots last seemingly forever, due to the fact they spy on you and get stuck every 15 mins so you never want to turn them on.
I have a Roborock that supposedly has Matter support (over WiFi not Thread, but still) and integrates into my Home assistant fairly well.
I wonder if it would break without Internet.
You can find out - set up a local DNS (pihole, blocky et. al.) and check which domains the vacuum connects to.
Then block those and see what happens! Interesting experiment for a weekend.
Unplugging the internet is also an option…
Depends how often it phones home?
Some devices are just dandy to not have Internet for an hour, or a day. But once it must phone home for definitely legitimate reasons - you’ll find it no longer works.
My daughter’s toy was like this. The company went bankrupt. Servers went down. The device worked for 30 days then it never worked again.
If it doesn’t work when the cloud is down, it’s not your thing. Don’t buy it. 8sleep is only the most recent example.
Not to support this cloud-only system, but I used to own an iR (several, actually) and they can clean the entire space, pause, and cancel/dock with physical buttons.
Though it loses a large chunk of its smarts without a connection. No floor plan retention, no room selection, no 1 pass/2 pass, no knowledge about no-go lines and zones, no adjustable suction based on room…
Really? It can’t do no-go zones and lines without the cloud? Even the „Chinese competition“ can do that without internet.
Afaik there is extremely limited storage on these bots, so the floor plan is stored server-side. No cloud, no server, no no-go capabilities.
If only we had things like 1tb storage in a tiny chip
I hope one day we could develop something like this
Line no go up if consumer has autonomy and awareness. Quick, marketing drones, put up more information about our amazing and very complex and totally unique super mega ultra cloud!
✨ profits ✨
The rommbas? Maybe. The other ones? They have plenty storage.
But there’s no real reason for that. Losing the smarts. It’s just artificial to achieve lower bom.
This year, iRobot launched an entirely new line of robot vacuums … adding lidar navigation to its line for the first time (over VSLAM).
Reminiscent of all the other failed tech companies that refused to implement better/newer tech.
I wouldn’t get one without lidar.
Time to DRM the trash out of them and spy on them, make money off subscriptions and selling the data to brokers who we trust to leak it to hackers again…
Didn’t they already try that? I figured that’s why Amazon wanted to buy them.
Buy a broom ya lazy bums
I don’t understand how these things took off in the first place. They seem about as helpful as a pet rocks. Well, less since the pet rock won’t spread your dog’s shit around the house.
If only they had a camera and Ai vision to avoid dog shit
I have bought several in the last decade. I’m techy and disabled, and wanted to help out around the house. I have bought from multiple manufacturer but only purchase their top-tier offering, as I want to replace vacuuming, not just compliment it. We have pulled the manual vac out three times in 9 years.
The cheaper ones are meh, but the expensive ones can truly replace vacuuming and mopping. My issue is that, across… 5 brands, none of them have lasted longer than 2 years, often much shorter lifespans. I recently bought a Roborock with an extended warranty from RR themselves, something none of the others offer, so I’m hoping to be using it for several years to come.
I mean I’ve had to replace a battery every 2 years otherwise this data point has kept working.
It cleans for you when you’re not there. Not everyone has pets. (And not every pet shits in the house)
I hate them. They’re loud and annoying and get stuck on things. I can vacuum my house a lot faster.
How is the dog shitting in the house the Roomba’s fault?
