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TL;DR: When Big Tech companies turn against their customers’ best interests, you can always count on dedicated hackers to step in and keep abandoned devices alive. Case in point: Google’s recently discontinued Nest products now have a new home that should keep them working for years to come.

Cody Kociemba, the developer behind the Hack/House collaborative project, is waging war against Google. The tech giant recently decided to discontinue the first two generations of its Nest Thermostat, stripping the devices of much of their original functionality. Thanks to Kociemba’s hacking efforts, Nest customers now have an alternative path to restoring the features Google removed.

Kociemba has launched the No Longer Evil project, an open-source initiative aimed at breathing new life into decommissioned first- and second-generation Nest thermostats. The custom software can effectively “revive” these devices, offering a modern control interface and returning full ownership and functionality to users. The community-driven project is explicitly designed to combat planned obsolescence imposed by Big Tech, Kociemba said, giving still-functional hardware a new lease on life.

According to the project’s GitHub repository, NLE’s core component is a custom firmware that modifies critical portions of the original Nest software to eliminate dependence on Google’s servers. The modified firmware intercepts Nest’s communication layer, rerouting network traffic to a custom server that hosts a replica of the original Nest API painstakingly developed through reverse engineering. As a result, the thermostat believes it is still communicating with the official Nest infrastructure, restoring remote functionality without Google’s involvement.

The NLE project began earlier this month, with Kociemba cautioning that the software remains highly experimental and will require extensive work and testing before reaching maturity. Users who rely on their Nest devices for essential heating or environmental control are strongly advised not to install the custom firmware – for now, at least.

In the long term, the NLE team aims to completely replace Google’s original firmware for the first two Nest generations. The custom firmware is expected to handle temperature adjustments, mode switching, and real-time smart home monitoring through a sleek interface designed to rival the official one.

Kociemba launched NLE both as a personal challenge and as an opportunity to claim a $15,000 bounty offered by the FULU Foundation, which rewards developers who liberate bricked devices from corporate ecosystems. He took advantage of the initiative while staying true to his principles of hardware hacking, reverse engineering, and resistance to unchecked corporate control.