I think sshd has been on the device since the initial launch in 2017, the company is publishing all source code they modify on their GitHub, the team seems very much pro open source and there is a relatively big hacking community around the devices already. It would take a lot for them to suddenly do a 180 on this when they are so deep into it already.

But it wouldn't be unheard of, but as a owner of one, I'm not really scared of it happening. Although if it would, the device would lose one of it's main buying point (for me at least) and I certainly wouldn't buy any more devices from them.

I would be genuinely curious to know how many people do ssh based tricks instead of paying for a subscription. Is it really worth pushing away your initial tech-savvy crowd for those couple of people that are not annoyed enough to leave?

Often these decisions are much less evil. Some update in the future is likely to require work on the SSH functionality to keep it working and if not enough people use it, they might decide to kill that feature. Happened often enough that a "simplification" of the tech stack or refactoring ended up killing features that were valued by many, but didn't rank high enough in usage stats.

Surely it isn't, but it would hardly be the first time a company did something in that boneheaded vein.

Yeah, that's for sure. I was once very happy with a Fintech app (a bank), very techy, an API, modern and cool features, tight community. Then they pivoted and started targetting another more mainstream crowd. They incorporated their insta-feed into the app, and all kinds of social and greenwashing features. Reviews are still poor. I keep wondering if they could not somehow have kept the techy, early adopters happy and started targeting a more mainstream crowd. Is that very difficult? Two versions of the app would have done it. But maybe the tech group is so small it's worth pissing off this small group- that jumps on new stuff eagerly and helps you debug and grow in an early stage. Quite depressing.

Sounds a bit like Bunq :) It was the darling of the tech community but most of my friends have moved away already. I never used it.

Bunq indeed. I stopped my subscription, it was glorious for as long as it lasted.

even with the free subscription I still access it over ssh aha

Considering how much trouble it is to lock down devices that were intended from the start to be locked down in the firmware (Nintendo Switch, etc.), I think it's pretty unlikely that this device could be effectively locked down with a software update.