When Qualcomm announced its acquisition of Arduino in October 2025, the tinkerer and maker community watched nervously. Large corporate acquisitions rarely end well for open platforms after all, and enshittification is something that often follows.
And now, what’s followed is unsettling. Adafruit Industries, makers of popular development boards and a respected voice in the open hardware space, have sounded the alarm.
According to Adafruit, the new policies introduce sweeping user-license provisions, broaden data collection (particularly around AI usage), and embed long-term account data retention, all while integrating user information into Qualcomm’s broader data ecosystem.
Section 7.1 grants Arduino a perpetual, irrevocable license over anything you upload. Your code, projects, forum posts, and comments all fall under this. This remains in effect even after you delete your account. Arduino retains rights to your content indefinitely.
Geez. Everybody should switch to PlatformIO already. It’s multiple magnitudes better. You can version control your dependencies without hunting down each package. That alone would be worth the switch.
As for hardware, ESP32 is also a magnitude more powerful, cheaper and smaller than Arduino. They can use the same code.
Their documentation is a bit shit (took me an entire night to figure out how to flash the code I compiled, and their built in web interface doesn’t help) but otherwise yea it’s a convenient piece of kit
Is the link correct?
The website tries selling something, but I can’t decipher what exactly. Certainly does not seem ESP32- or Arduino-related.
Ops their website is different https://platformio.org/
Does it support Arduino hardware too? Or is it ewaste now?
What? Pio had supported Arduino for the longest time