> it’s not criminal to remove functionality from a previously-sold device
I'm sure it's not criminal, given today's laws.
Think about that statement though. It absolutely should, morally, be criminal to take away something that was sold as functioning.
Imagine in the 80s that VCR manufacturers sent people to your home at night to open your VCR and cut some traces so it could play but no longer record. Would be an outrage. Also, fortunately, was in practice impossible.
Just because today devices are built to enable damaging functionality from afar doesn't means it is suddenly ok.
I never said it was OK. The parent specifically wondered if some law prohibited this practice (which there isn't, given Google's legal team surely has all their bases covered).
Similarly I don't think any reasonable person or judge will agree bricking a device is called 'update'.
I had a bunch of IoT lightbulbs intentionally bricked by the manufacturer. I can't remember the name of the company now. Something beginning with "F," and ending with "Electric," I think. This was back in the days before HomeKit, when IoT was even more Wild West than it is today.
I had about a dozen of the light bulbs around the house, all controlled by the company's hub, and an app on the phone. One day the company sent an e-mail stating that the system was no longer supported and would no longer function, and it also sent a forced software update to the hub, disabling everything.
I searched around the internet and found lots of people who were mad that the gear they paid for suddenly stopped functioning for no reason. Lots of speculation, but nobody ever seemed to nail down why.