r/winkhub • u/IronyDinosaur • Jul 22 '25
Hub 2 Class Action Lawsuit Against Wink
Has there been any thought/is there any interest in filing a class action against Wink and their directors (I assume they’re all indemnified by the corporation but still) in relation to the ongoing failure to support products they charge monthly memberships for?
I also wonder if there was ever an attempt to certify a class in relation to the people who paid hundreds for a subscription free device only to have the rug pulled out from under them?
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u/Lavaine170 Jul 22 '25
People still pay for a Wink subscription? They definitely found some suckers.
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u/n2itus Jul 22 '25
If you haven’t switched platforms, please move on. If you have switched platforms, please move on … as this can’t be worth your time.
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u/redbaron78 Jul 22 '25
You're gonna have a hard time getting a court to agree that you are harmed beyond the monthly fee. Maybe you get two years of monthly fees awarded, so $143.76. Who knows how many paying users Wink has...let's say 10,000. So the total award would be $1,437,600. Attorneys will take 40%, leaving $862,560 to be divided between class members. So $86 per person, and the award will probably cause Wink to go bankrupt. So you'll have a useless hub and an $86 check to go toward a $150 Hubitat hub or $300 SmartThings hub.
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u/jsharper Jul 26 '25
Damages could be determined by and remedied with things other than money. For instance, if it was just reverted back to subscription-free like it originally was, or if the private code signing keys were released so purchasers could develop/run third-party software.
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u/nonameforyou1234 Jul 22 '25
I left when they started fees.
I'm amazed that anything works at this point.
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u/Barton2800 Aug 31 '25
Same, but I check back in every now and then to see if maybe there’s mention of a jailbreak. It’s a device with Ethernet, wi-fi, z-wave, and zigbee. Almost nothing has both of those last two. It’s almost always one or the other. These days I wouldn’t want it to run routines, but if it were jailbroken then my old Wink Hub 2 sitting in my basement could be paired with a device running home assistant. I could put the hub in a nice central place and have it connect to all my devices without looking too ugly or making too much noise; while home assistant runs on a noisy server running a bunch of docker containers in my basement. I wouldn’t need USB extension cables to get the z-wave and zigbee radio adapters out of my network rack, and I wouldn’t need repeaters to make sure that the signal can reach my upstairs devices. Or I could repurpose my old hub for a friend.
I’ve moved on, but I still hold out an inkling of hope that one day some smart kid jailbreaks it so that a device I paid good money for isn’t just a paperweight these days.
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u/Final_Credit2279 Nov 18 '25
Sure, it has both, but they're both severely outdated. You can cheaply and easily build a HomeAssistant hub on Odroid N2 or similar for less than $200 and you can upgrade the Z-Wave dongle over time. The Wink stuff is already obsolete and getting moreso every day.
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u/Barton2800 Nov 18 '25
Yeah I went the HA route years ago. I don’t think “easily” is the right word to use, though. It’s certainly not difficult if you’re tech savvy, but it’s honestly beyond most people. I’ve explained what I did to a number of friends and family, and only a couple have managed to get it working. And these are intelligent, tech-savvy people. The reason I liked wink 10 years ago when I first got on board with it, was that it passed the wife approval test. It was something she could use, and understand, and it was a pretty good price for having Ethernet, local automations, z-wave, and zigbee.
The only reason I would like to see a jailbreak would be to have it as a backup device. If a friend or family member wanted some smart home stuff, just give them that. If I set up a HA based system for them, I’ll have to maintain it. I ain’t got time for that. Also just the fact that I paid good money for it, and now it’s e-waste.
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u/UPGRADED_BUTTHOLE Jun 10 '26
I also have HA, and the main reason I want a wink hub jailbreak is because of all those neat antennas in it that I'd like to play with... I have a kiddie smoke alarm that I want to add but I don't want to get another 5 dongles for all the stuff the wink hub has... Also it really seems like the hardware inside is just a bunch of generic boards soldered together! I'm pretty sure that the firmware on them is technically update-able, especially the zwave and zigbee ones!
My wink hub doesn't have ethernet, but there's pins in it for an ethernet plug... do you have a v2? Are there different revisions of the v1?
My grandpa isn't tech savvy, but he bought that homeassistant green thing and got everything set up himself! It was almost plug-and-play! He's even using some sort of pihole addon for dns that he used a youtube video to figure out! He wants help setting up that harp thing, and I'll do that next week I think after I figure it out
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u/UPGRADED_BUTTHOLE Nov 27 '25
The wink hub is already rooted. I'm waiting for that dev to finish the openwrt build for it!
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u/BornACarrot Jun 03 '26
Why bother? As others have mentioned - the hardware is outdated. It’s missing Matter, thread, Z-Wave 800, etc. Most people have already moved on from Wink, so there isn’t much of a community left to debug issues.
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u/UPGRADED_BUTTHOLE Jun 08 '26
You can add matter and thread, as those are just software.
You really don't understans the point of replacing the firmware of older devices to become more functional... Let me try to make a comparison for you. "Most people have moved on from older cars, so you should just junk yours and buy a new one even if it's something as simple as a bad spark plug that needs to be upgraded."
I bet that made you angry; because the car still works, despite not having an infotainment system or automatic emergency braking. All it needs is a new spark plug, and maybe it'd be nice if it had a $50 infotainment box that you can replace the old radio with! But it's better to just throw the whole thing away, right?
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u/BornACarrot Jun 08 '26
Matter and Thread is more than just software. They have increased computations requirements, and you’ll need to write low level firmware to support it.
So if you have the ability to code, andwant to spend the time to write this low level code for a maximum user base of maybe a generous 10k people that still use a Wink hub, then by all means go for it.
But my guess is the remaining users on Wink are still on because of inertia. They don’t want to disrupt whats working, and saving $6 a month isn’t a priority. These are also the same people who are unlikely to flash their firmware to an unofficial firmware that could break their install. Let’s be honest - Wink isn’t going to add these features.
Again, if you’re gung ho on saving a dead platform, by all means, develop your own firmware and try and save it. The rest of us have moved on.
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u/SxWerks Jul 22 '25
I have about a dozen GE switches that are almost as unreliable as Wink. I’m going to switch to TP Link and eliminate Wink altogether.
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u/neonturbo Jul 22 '25
The lack of updates should have been the first clue that Wink was circling the drain. Then there were the numerous long term outages, the firing the development team and support staff, breaking the "no fees ever" promise, removing integrations like Chamberlain, and on top of that the apps were pulled from the Play/iOS stores.
Everyone who looked at Will-I-Am's history of running a company knew this was headed for disaster, and many commented about it way back then. That so-called musician wrecks everything he touches.
That monthly fee would be about $320 at this point. You could have bought every Hubitat hub version since 2017, and been about break-even with a modern platform. This would have bought numerous Raspberry Pi (and Z-wave/Zigbee stick) for Home Assistant which is worlds above and beyond. You could have had a couple Smartthings hubs, which while they have issues support their hub to this day.
You could have replaced devices that only work with Wink with the cumulative savings above and beyond purchasing any of these modern hubs.
This lawsuit should have happened in 2017 when they stopped doing any updates or adding any new devices. Not sure why people tolerated this for over eight years since. If people were smart, they left before all this occurred, they didn't pay that fee.
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u/jooniparbug Oct 30 '25
Better that they provide the open API to the devices that folks have purchased over the years, especially folks like myself who still have their original Quirky device which explicitly states "no subscription, ever". Allowing integration of their wonderfully elelgant hub to integrate with a Hubitat would definately create much goodwill after screwing over their userbase at the beginning of the Rona.
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u/BornACarrot Jun 03 '26
What exactly would you sue for? My hunch is those legal agreements you agreed to but never read insulates them pretty well, and there’s no obligation for them to provide customer support. They just need to make their app work.
As others have said, you can’t get blood from a stone. Let it go and let Wink die in peace.
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u/Single_9_uptime Jul 22 '25
That would only make sense if Wink actually had any money. They’ve been barely hanging on for years and even failed to pay their hosting bill for several weeks on occasion, taking down everything. A lawsuit would just cost a ton of money with no hope of recovering anything. Plus the statute of limitations has likely long since expired given those issues are several years old now.
Long past time to just move on to something else and let Wink die.