Today I received an unexpected email that left me pretty disheartened. It came from the official account of Qvadis, the company behind the smart intercom I have installed at home. The message couldn’t be clearer. Here I’m pasting it, translated into English, from the original message in Spanish:
Server Shutdown – Official Qvadis Statement
Dear Qvadis Owner,
We regret to inform you that, despite our efforts to keep the business running, Qvadis Innova will definitively shut down at the end of May 2025.
Your Qvadis device will continue to function locally, both as an intercom and as a WiFi smart home panel for connected devices in your home or business. However, starting May 25, 2025, our Cloud server will go offline, which means the connection between the device and the Qvadis mobile app will stop working, as will integration with other Cloud services such as Alexa.
We thank you for the trust you placed in our product and are sorry we couldn’t take Qvadis as far as we had hoped.
Sincerely,
The Qvadis Team
As I explained in my post Turning the door intercom into a smart intercom (and II), this little gadget allowed me to open the main gate of my building for delivery people and visitors from my attic office—or even from outside my home. And now, I’m about to lose that functionality.
The Qvadis One runs on a closed-source firmware that appears to be based on embedded Linux. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they have any plans to release the code or open up the system in a way that would let us repurpose the hardware. Without access to their servers, it would be great if we could still do things like place calls to a SIP server (whether hosted at home or in the cloud) or run our own alternative cloud server.
I’d be more than willing to pay a monthly fee just to keep the Qvadis server alive. And I imagine many other satisfied users would feel the same.
So, What Are the Alternatives?
Do I migrate to a Ring Intercom and just hope Amazon doesn’t pull the plug someday too? Are we forever at the mercy of companies who can shut down key services on a whim?
When will a company finally offer a solution that truly considers tech-savvy users and afficionados?
There’s definitely a market out there for a product that combines robust hardware with an open, documented ecosystem. Not everyone wants to depend on closed platforms, opaque apps, or unpredictable corporate decisions. Many of us—an increasing number, in fact—want to tinker, integrate, and customize.
Hopefully, Qvadis’ shutdown will serve as a wake-up call. Because while some companies still focus solely on closed models, many users are waiting for a better solution—one that gives us the best of both worlds: ease of use for the average consumer, and full freedom for those of us who want more control.