Blynk 1.0 (legacy) retirement timeline announced!

It is interesting. Can you give a little more details on how it works with ESP?

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Yes, you can set-up a local Legacy server running on a Pi or Windows machine, but as you say that approach won’t buy you an indefinite solution.

Without updates to the local server software it won’t keep-up with Java releases and won’t get security fixes. Because the local server source code is publicly available, it could be updated by people with the relevant skills, but there’s obviously a risk associated with trusting a 3rd party to make these changes.

As far as the phone app is concerned, having it removed from the App Store will be a major issue for iOS users, as most people don’t want to jailbreak their brand new iPhone to enable them to load the app, and it won’t be too long before an iOS update would make the app incompatible anyway.

Life is a little simpler for Android users, as they could side load the app, but newer versions of Android OS and new phone hardware will eventually become incompatible with the Blynk Legacy app.

This will create a situation where users have to maintain an old phone to enable them to still run Blynk Legacy, which negates the usefulness of the app.

There is also quite a large overhead attached to setting-up and maintaining a local server. A Raspberry Pi with an SD card will eventually fail without motive, as SD cards have a limited read-write life. Installing an SSD is a better option, but obviously more costly.
Some skills are also needed to configure port forwarding and DDNS to enable the app to be used outside of the local server.
There’s also work to do in terms of maintenance and backups, and the recent changes to Gmail that no longer allows the use of insecure apps means that emailing Auth tokens, report links etc will no longer work.

Considering all of this, and having run a Blynk local server myself for a while, I wouldn’t recommend anyone going down this route at this stage, unless they need to run Blynk in an environment where no internet or GPRS access is available.

Pete.

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Kodular is used to create your UI which communicates with Google Firebase which in turn communicates with the esp, so as an example if you turn a switch on on your UI you send a signal 1 to firebase. The esp reads the 1 on firebase and takes action. Simple as that

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Yeah, that’s will be fixed at some point.

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Sounds great.
Also a mobile viewable web console would be really good. Because choosing desktop view on a mobile browser will make the content ant tiny and will be hard to work with.

This would solve the problem of having a computer to start with. But again to program the device one needs a computer :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.

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I wouldn’t call end of 2022 plenty of time. I basically have to migrate donzens of iot devices in 2 homes to the new platform. Ideally using OTA but if that fails it will be desoldering, reprogramming, resoldering.
And if i don’t find the time to do this in the next 7 months multiple sensors, lights and windows will be unusable.
I guess this is what you get when you rely on external software.

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I get sad. But deeply grateful to have used the platform all these years.
I can’t migrate from legacy to 2.0 as it doesn’t have a map widget or custom button.
There is a monthly package, but it is out of reality for Brazilians since it is in Dollars.

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Its better to buy a ready device. These days they come in cheap. And there is no monthly subscription. If you are not a maker then just install the ready product n you are done. Looks like you dont often try to modify your devices.

Blynk is suitable only for those who want to create, tinker etc etc…

Blynk 2.0 has all of that

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All my devices are custom made PCB’s when i did have time to tinker. But that is about 5 years ago when i first started using Blynk.

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Oops. Then you will have to subscribe to plus plan.

They will work fine with Blynk IoT, unless they use Bluetooth.

Pete.

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Yup. I know.
Only available on the monthly plan. In the free plan, it doesn’t.
The Brazilian currency is not worth anything, so $6.99 is a lot for us.

Ohhh , it is very sad this :frowning: , can not understand that also the server goes down for 1mil. users in 7 months ???
It was easy when it is nessesary to fill the energie time by time with some money to have a payment to keep this server alive i believe please …

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Please provide us legacy application resources if possible because we have done many of our projects based on Blynk Legacy :upside_down_face: :cry: :sob:

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…adding to that: anyone knows how to save the App locally for a later re-install?
As the App will disappear from the phone’s OS app-stores, when you switch phones or loose a phone backup, your local projects will be dead in the water as well, won’t they.

Why would it make sense for Blynk to share the intellectual property rights to the app?
This would only result in companies taking all of Blynk’s hard work and publishing their own app, and setting-up their own local server, and encouraging Legacy users to use that rather than migrating to a Blynk IoT paid subscription.
That would deprive Blynk of a potential income stream from these users.

If you were Blynk, and had put so much time, money and effort into developing Blynk IoT would your release the IPR to the Legacy app? I certainly wouldn’t.

Pete.

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I completely agree with you. But how much version of Android does Blynk Legacy support? For example, can Android 16 support Blynk Legacy?
thanks.

I don’t know, I’m an iOS user myself.

Pete.

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Yes you can use Blynk legacy with the latest Android if you clone it from old android Phone … I bought a new Oppo Reno with the latest version Android, I tried to install Legacy from an APK file and it didn’t work, then I cloned it from old oppo where legacy was installed and it works on my new Oppo.

It works also with blue stack but you have to install old version 4, in this way I use Blynk 1 from my PC windows 10.

Kodular and Firebase are not free and it takes a lot of time to construct your UI and Arduino code and will never reach the high level of proficiency as with Blynk which is complete and ready to use…

Blynk 2 is very professional and the future of IoT, in the beginning I As sceptical to use it but now I see it has many options and accessibility very useful and can’t find in legacy or any other Blynk similar APP…
Some people said Arduino Cloud is an Alternative, tried it out and it was a shame.