The idea seemed simple: If you find yourself regularly ordering the same thing from Amazon — coffee, laundry detergent, whatever — why not replace the whole ordering process with a button you put somewhere in your house? Push a button, get a thing.
And from that, Amazon’s Dash button was born. Announced one day before April Fools’ 2015, people were not sure if it was actually real.
It was! But now it is dead.
Amazon stopped selling the Dash button earlier this year; now they are ending support for them altogether. In an email to Dash users, Amazon says that Dash button devices will cease to function as of August 31st, 2019.
Why? They are not selling any more of them, and too few people are using the ones that still exist. An Amazon rep told CNET that usage of the buttons “had significantly slowed” over the last few months.
While the Dash button program may not have ever taken off, people found their own fun uses for the hardware since launch.
After Amazon started selling re-purposable, hackable Dash buttons that could be used to fire off custom scripts on the internet, one modder built a button that automatically placed his favorite Starbucks order as he was walking out the door.
If you have still got a Dash button around the house and do not know what to do with it after the end of the month, Amazon is encouraging people to send the buttons into its recycling program (which covers the costs of shipping/disposal.)
