I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-smart-home-3319869/

by Corrado • 3 years ago

498 345 3 years ago

Corrado4• 3 years ago

I feel like this is just one more thing that Google leadership is failing at. I have some similar examples to the ones in the article. I recommended that my brother-in-law get a Google wifi AP some years ago. Recently, I got an email from Google saying that they are no longer supporting it and after a certain date you will no longer be able to make changes to it. WTF?!? My Apple Airport Extreme is older than the Google AP and it still gets updates and I'm free to change the settings at any time.

Another example was my old Nest thermostat. I was so excited to up-my-game and replace the old, crappy thermostat with something that could change the temperature based on the weather forecast. My happiness was short lived; Google purchased Nest and forced everyone to change over to their Google account. Then features stopped working. I finally had to remove the Nest and replace it with something else, mostly because Google just seemed to not care anymore.

goosedragons• 3 years ago

TBF Airport Extremes stopped getting updates years ago. The last update was 7.9.1 from 2019. Granted you can still change settings and not being able to do that after discontinuation is pretty inexcusable.

doctor_eval3• 3 years ago

I scored a handful of these years ago, and they still run my house internet. Airport utility still works too. On all devices. They are great little APs.

knolan2• 3 years ago

I love my Time Capsule. It worked flawlessly for a nearly a decade when the disk inevitably failed.

I still use it in my office for backups with a new disk. I wish Apple still made them and made swapping disks tool free.

bombcar3• 3 years ago

I had an AirPort Express as an audio bridge to my stereo for years, maybe a decade? Thing was bullet-proof and the only reason I finally put it down was all the new stereos have built-in casting of some sort.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/203874699472 was great, had everything you could want in a compact size, and was compatible with the power adapter cables (which are still the same these days)!

katbyte• 3 years ago

Is time capsule any different the Time Machine backups to networked eogtage?

largepeepee• 3 years ago

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored.

Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.

Such a pity, Google used to be the most respected of the SV big tech.

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

I had to delete the YouTube app simply because there was no way to disable Shorts. Those things are hopelessly addictive and unavoidable. If I wanted shorts, I'd install TikTok.

cogman102• 3 years ago

Google is just shit.

As my company briefly decided to look into using them for a cloud provider it quickly became apparent that they are just awful stewards of any software that isn’t related to advertisements.

It’s beyond shocking how amateurish GCP is being operated.

My assumption is it comes down to really awful leadership. They only care about making and selling new things. You simply can’t trust that any piece of software or hardware will receive ongoing support, including their cloud offerings.

kps• 3 years ago

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored.

As someone who had been working at Google in this space (Nest Hubs, Matter, and planned thing I couldn't tell you about even if I knew its current status) until the decimation, I assure you it's not only products that get left behind.

pedrobnsilva• 3 years ago

Agreed. See this across all of Google products.

It's amazing to me that Google Assistant was more useful when it came out than it is today. Just the past few days I've been dealing with this bug where I can't even set an alarm through it.

Google Photos is another one: content-based search used to work really well, but totally unreliable today.

riemannzeta3• 3 years ago

Not allowing good search within a channel is the most ridiculous. They're a search company. How is that self-consistent? Especially when you know they have the data and index, but are simply using it for advertising.

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

Same happened to me with investing in the Fitbit ecosystem. Hope they don't botch Reminders next with their migrations to Tasks

voakbasda• 3 years ago

When Google bought Fitbit, ours went in a drawer. We know how they operate, so we outright do not trust them. I wonder how many other people take a similar approach to products that Google buys.

yellow_mixer• 3 years ago

If you’re looking for a good read, pick up a copy of Tony Fadell’s “Build”. There are a few interesting chapters where he writes about the process of selling Nest to Google.

MR4D• 3 years ago

The Nest situation is actually even worse - you specifically need a Gmail account on a Google domain.

If you have a Google hosted domain on gmail like I do, it won’t work.

I’ll never buy a nest again either.

therealdrag0• 3 years ago

Why is that such a problem. Just make a throwaway account that you log into once a year for the nest. Just like you would if it was some other random company(create a new account).

linsomniac3• 3 years ago

That is the TP-Link router, right? I had one of those, recently replaced it with a used Ruckus R610, and oddly enough, the coverage of a single R610 seems to beat the coverage of 4 of the Google WiFi points.

titzer2• 3 years ago

Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible. My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to "upgrade" my home remotely via software can get fucked.

13of404• 3 years ago

Same here, but I want to say some bad things about old thermostats. My first house had propane heating, in a big tank that they would periodically come by and fill, so I had a visceral connection to how much fuel I was using. The previous owner had left the original 1960s mercury thermostats running the place, which meant that barring any initiative on my end the temperature was the same no matter if I was sleeping, at work, or whatever else it is people do. When I finally got around to replacing it with a digital programmable one, it cut my propane bill in half. Do you need to hook it to your smart phone? No, that's dumb. Do you need to choose between bleeding money vs. adjusting everything manually as part of your daily routine, like your grandfather winding the hallway clock? No, also dumb. Local digital is the way to go.

ksec2• 3 years ago

Somehow software people have forgotten

Thank You. And that is precisely why I increasingly hate anything that comes with software.

__MatrixMan__3• 3 years ago

I wonder if we could wield regulation to discourage products that phone home without also providing the ability to:

- install a cert so we can MITM the traffic and see what they're phoning home about

- turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality

- configure a different address for cloud I/O, such that I can run the "cloud" part on my own infra if I want those features

thayne2• 3 years ago

Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible

Maybe a little. But I think a big part of it is businesses realizing they can make a lot more money, at least in the short term, if people have to replace their products more often.

chaostheory2• 3 years ago

The main reason these new thermostats need upgrades is because they can be controlled remotely via the the internet. It’s a constant security issue.

cabalamat2• 3 years ago

The new one is digital but isn't "smart".

I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are

- unnecessarily complicated

- privacy destroying

- overpriced

- vendor lock-in

- often infected with online ads you can't get rid of

- likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it

IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" device.

brookst• 3 years ago

physical things last a long time

There's a lot of survivor bias here. I have had plenty of dumb physical things fail in what seems like unreasonably short times.

But I do have done physical dumb devices that are 100+ years old. I do not interpret that to mean that everything from that era / factory / manufacturer lasts 100 years, just that all of the surviving items did.

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

Here's a scenario. I own one of these new-fangled wifi thermostats. The developers frequently update the firmware remotely. There is no way to disable this 'feature' that I know of.

Let's say the update fails catastrophically (loses power during flashing etc) and the device is bricked. I'm not home, it's dead of winter, pipes freeze, burst, and flood my home. Far fetched? Maybe, maybe not. Who is liable for this? I'm sure the "click to agree" EULA when the thermostat boots up absolves them of responsibility.

bgro• 3 years ago

Software for maintenance devices shouldn't be written so it forces people to use a cloud service unless they can guarantee that will always work. There's about 1000 points of failure in that.

Actually, I'm pretty sure DVDs and music CDs and games only exist because that was their only option. If you look at what the law is and what they're trying to do, you don't own the rights to the game you buy.

If they could forcefully take it back from you and disable the in game radio because their license expired, they would. And they do, when they can. Same with movies you "buy" instead of renting for money. They can and do just change their licensing and remove it from your account.

Game launchers also do this. If you get banned in 1 game, they can just delete your entire account and all linked services because you're not really buying the game.

You're barely even buying a license to use it. You basically have zero rights other than where technology has limited them.

Anyway, that aside, software shouldn't be your only concern. It has all of the visibility right now, but tech hardware should also be up there. Physical life of tech is currently terrible. An unopened, factory sealed electronic left in a store will still die after like 5 to 10 years. Nobody wants to or can feasibly repair it so it's just e-waste. Analog equipment exists for some things with higher tech solutions adding functionality and reducing power in some cases, but I'm curious to see more data about how these truly compare.

I came across this while looking at how to backup data for a long time. I was also curious about the case of analog devices in space. It's been hard to find a lot of info about it.

stjohnswarts2• 3 years ago

The one I just replaced was going on the fritz after 25 years (15 years old when I moved into this house, I checked the mfg date). I got another pretty dumb (but programmable) thermostat that isn't wifi anything. So I think you made a good call on 20-30 years.

13of404• 3 years ago

It's kind of the way of the world now, not just Google. I've accumulated a ton of stuff that just doesn't work anymore or works in a crippled local-only mode because the service doesn't exist anymore or drivers/software stopped getting updates. What's really sad is buying something, having a little bit of fun with it, then going back to it a year or two later and finding out it's a brick now. Or just buying something "new" and finding out it was born into the grave.

SomeHacker44• 3 years ago

Recently I noticed I could not turn my Nest thermostat "off" anymore, on the device or on the app. Wait, what??? Any ideas?

toast02• 3 years ago

I've never seen that? But pull it off the baseplate and it'll be off. ;p

ksec2• 3 years ago

I feel like this is just one more thing that Google leadership is failing at.

Apart from increasing ad revenue, there isn't a single thing that Google's leadership has been succeeding.

dheera• 3 years ago

Another example was my old Nest thermostat.

Speaking of Nest, I got rate limited trying to access images from my own Nest camera. WTF? I paid for it and I own it. I will get as much rate from it as the hardware can support.

jahewson• 3 years ago

I’m using Nest without a Google Account. It nags me to migrate but I’ve never done so. I deleted my Google account because I was using a custom domain and Google moved that functionality to Workspace and wanted to charge for it, while half of Google products don’t support it fully and there was no migration path to a regular account. I could pay for something broken or loose all my data. So I wrote some scripts and migrated to iCloud.

sho_hn• 3 years ago

Hardware companies get a lot of flak for inadquate software. On the other hand, software companies have no idea what kind of commitment it means to launch a product line. Hardware companies don't do this without determining lifespan/support window ahead of time and designing for it; sw companies basically do whatever, you can always shut it down.

ChuckMcM• 3 years ago

I could not agree more with this sentiment. On an abstract level it is really interesting to me to see if this is how open source eventually wins all the things. I have an ASUS WiFi AP that has been running DD-WRT->OpenWRT for 15 years at this point (changing the underlying hardware twice, once to get 802.11n, and again to get 802.11ac).

I look forward to the day when there are "standard schematics" for this sort of gear which has the level of interoperability that has been achieved in USB and WiFi.

Corrado4• 3 years ago

Funnily enough, there used to be "standard schematics" provided with electronic things. I think my first computer (VIC-20?) had pretty detailed information on the external ports (joystick, power, printer, etc.) I also look forward to the time when we get back what we used to have.

flanbiscuit• 3 years ago

I had the same router they stopped supporting, it worked great but I ended up buying their newer nest wifi because I also wanted a mesh point. They work great as well. I am waiting for the day they also stop supporting them. What's the alternative? What company makes good routers that would get updates over many years? My guess is that I should be looking at ones where I can flash a open source firmware (OpenWRT?)

midoridensha2• 3 years ago

What company makes good routers that would get updates over many years? My guess is that I should be looking at ones where I can flash a open source firmware (OpenWRT?)

Yes, that's exactly it. You have to look for routers that are well-supported by OpenWRT or DD-WRT or Tomato. You can't trust any company to support their product over a very long time period any more.

George83728• 3 years ago

For all their faults (I no longer buy their products) Apple is, or at least traditionally was, a company that makes money by making and selling things, so they try to be good at making things.

Google is an advertising company that occasionally tries making and selling things to cope with the insecurity they feel about being an advertising company. But they've never been good at it and never will be.

rektide2• 3 years ago

It'll be interesting to see if this repeats.

I have a little bit of sympathy for eliminating a 6 year old wifi router, largely because it was built around some Qualcomm chipsets on what was probably at that time a 2+ year old linux kernel. This is Qualcomm's fault. Qualcomm provides awful Board Support Packages with limited shelf life. Qualcomm makes disposable products.

Now, I do think it's awful that Google built thing in such a way that the router is entirely unconfigurable after it runs out of support. That's absurd. But I do pity Google for using one of the only options available to them & it being an absolute awful unsupportable shit show.

It's part Qualcomm & part community, but we are starting to see a lot more work upstreaming Qualcomm drivers. It gives me hope that some of the openwrt routers folks buy today will remain good & usable & secure & reasonably capable, even in 10, 15, even 20 years.

Trias11• 3 years ago

I used Nest and my experience was that no matter settings I configure, Google always override something with what "they think" is better for me.

We eventually sold the house, otherwise frustration would continue

nunodonato• 3 years ago

People just don't seem to learn what google is like...

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

The internet is a series of pipes, connected to an infinite supply of useful idiots, who are just waiting to be duped and bilked.

/s?

smt88• 3 years ago

I know what Google is like. As a smartphone user, I only have two options if I want my phone and smart home to work in the same ecosystem: Apple and Google.

I don't even know how this is possible, but Siri is worse, so I'm stuck with Google.

bitwize• 3 years ago

While touring the house we eventually bought, my wife spied a Nest on the wall and said, "Oh, that's one thing bitwize is gonna want to rip out." Hooking your home up to the cloud and depending on cloud services for its operation just strikes me as the king of dumb ideas. You've got private, intimate data flowing to who knows where, cloud malfunctions affecting regular home operations (this has already happened at least once with the Nest), and what's discussed here: here-today, gone-tomorrow support with no recourse once the vendor decides to turn support off.

leipert2• 3 years ago

Jup. A family member has Nest thermostats. Server went down. The thermostats cranked up to 30C / 86F as the failure mode. Just makes no sense. I get that you don’t want freezing pipes, if the server goes down, but come on.

Bluecobra• 3 years ago

That sounds a bit far fetched to me, I have had my Internet go down multiple times and never have a Nest problem. In fact I don’t even think an Internet connection is required if you just want it to be a dumb thermostat.

The default safety settings on my nest is 45F for heat and 95F for AC. This setting is user adjustable so maybe your family member override it.

sgerenser• 3 years ago

I find this hard to believe. The thermostat has a local copy of the heat/cool setpoints, why wouldn’t it just keep using those if it can’t access the server? At a minimum it’s a bug, not just the normal operation when it can’t access the cloud.

Silhouette3• 3 years ago

I was amazed - in a bad way - when we were looking into getting solar for our home and almost all of the systems relied on some kind of mobile app for their UI, often via a cloud service. These are systems that should have a working life of decades! What mobile or cloud platform today will even still be here and fully compatible in ten years? Want to bet tens of thousands on that?! (Plus of course all the usual "smart" home concerns.)

mattmanser2• 3 years ago

And worse still these things get inflicted on the next home owner.

I bought a house with a "smart" boiler and the UI and app are absolutely atrocious.

Worse still it doesn't have basic functionality like my parent's manual system had 40 years ago like temporarily being able to turn it on without changing the schedule, doesn't have a weekend setting, requires me to send my email address and address to a third party who then have full access to when I turn the system I to holiday mode. Basically a lovely treasure trove for thieves.

michaelt2• 3 years ago

99% of solar/battery systems will work just fine with no internet connection.

In fact often the internet connectivity is a separate plug-in module you can just not install.

Loads of these devices get installed into garages and suchlike where the wifi is no good, so most installers will know that their systems can work without internet connectivity and will be used to installing them that way.

mattmanser2• 3 years ago

I'm surprised they're not being sued in the EU over this.

You have conaumer rights over the reasonable lifetime of a product for something to keep working.

The reasonable lifetime of a home surveillance system, as he says in the article, is 10+ years.

b112• 3 years ago

To me, the funny thing is that google could use brand awareness to engender trust. When I buy some new fangled toy, I often look for a trusted name, instead of something made overseas, with an incomprehensible name.

But it is almost the opposite. Fly by night names and resellers on amazon, are more stable than google. Some even have far better support!

Just bizarre.

Someone should tell google that outside of SV, people hate iterate often, hate fast change, and just want security updates and bug fixes, no feature changes, no gui improvements, just stable stable stable for decades.

And google could do it so easily! Shared dev platforms, long term support branches, they could own the world.

And they could open source old hardware firmwares at end of life. Strutt and preen about how they are the beautiful peacock of the OSS world, and do their best to keep old hardware from the trash.

Instead they are so short sighted, they can't see beyond a quarter. ChatGPT and its potential was well known, google is a subject matter expert, and yet they were astonished at the progess and press and bing?!?!

They have no vision, no look ahead, trash their brand, destroy their image, piss off consumers, and for what?

To dabble in things they well know will shut down tomorrow anyhow. Gee, great.

gondaloof3• 3 years ago

But it is almost the opposite

It feels like I only hear this on tech forums. Everyone outside trusts Google and that’s kind of the issue

formerly_proven• 3 years ago

Just use KNX. These proprietary single-vendor solutions will all turn into unserviceable e-waste sooner than later.

eska• 3 years ago

https://killedbygoogle.com/

I’m sorry but you’re asking for it when you go Google.

ilayn• 3 years ago

If only the author knew to what level Home Assistant reached, they would not even bother with google or alexa.

gondaloof3• 3 years ago

What can HA do that Google/Alexa can’t?

c4mpute2• 3 years ago

Break even faster. Upgrading HA is a chore, it frequently breaks, ceases to understand its own configuration, drops integrations.

isoprophlex• 3 years ago

Not milk it's users for every iota of personal information for one, and of course actual customization and almost infinite hackability if you are so inclined

lawn• 3 years ago

The amount of possible integrations and customization possible with Google isn't even the same playing field as what HA can do.

I've integrated monitoring my heatpump, solar palens, speakers, Ikea and Philips lights, Todoist, calendars, Garmin and much more. All controllable via Python scripting.

amf122• 3 years ago

Here's me trying to install HA a few months ago on an old Windows laptop:

"Oh, the HA OS requires a VM? Let me create one. But now, my bluetooth isn't accessible to HA. Oh well let me try Core. Great, but now I can't do automatic updates, or restore from backups. Ugh fine. I'll do it manually.

Some integrations needs setting up APIs? Well the documentation doesn't explain much. Oh this one needs me to setup external access using their service or set up a cert. Man this is a lot of work for some automation to turn on my lights or connect to the services I need.

Fuck, let me just do this all in Google Home."

Has Home Assistant reached Google or Alexa in setup?

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

I feel the author would be wise to invest in learning some English, such as "neither... nor".

bruce343434• 3 years ago

Investing? To me it implies stocks. You are not investing in anything, you are consuming goods and services.

When people buy loads of crap and call it "investing in a [good] ..." is that some sort of coping mechanism?

No, you don't own boot futures. You bought some boots and you wear them.

gondaloof3• 3 years ago

It’s my money, it’s always an investment hoping to get some return, either happiness or convenience. It’s not meant to be taken literally.

michaelt2• 3 years ago

Would you invest in a sandwich? Or a foreign holiday?

WantonQuantum• 3 years ago

The verb "to invest" predates the usage you say it implies for you. This might be a sign that there are other usages.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

From vague memory, "investing" has been a Sales Dept. buzzword since at least the 1970's. Typically used to ease a prospective customer into spending too much (if not way too much) money on something. With fairly explicit implications about $Product being awesome, admired by people you know, and lasting an exceptionally long time. And implicit implications of getting the customer emotionally invested in $Product - to the point where he is no longer making rational decisions, and spending way too much money.

reedf1• 3 years ago

Investing is just anything you buy with an expected return. So you can buy boots with the expectation of selling them - and that is an investment.

But I completely agree with your fundamental point - it would be better described as a sunk-cost.

tjoff• 3 years ago

You invest in an ecosystem. That means that you are aware of the vendor lock-in and realize that moving to something else is going to be expensive and troublesome. Perhaps having to get rid of devices you've collected over a decade or having to engineering a hybrid solution with weird shortcomings. But by investing in it you expect returns as in a coherent system that work well together and that you can easily add more functionality over time and that also increases the utility of your existing devices.

The problems associated with it are why many, like me, refuse to be so dependent on any vendor.

And step one is to not buy anything that depends on the cloud to function.

blitzar• 3 years ago

The Latin verb investire meant “to clothe” or “to surround” (the prefix in- + vestīre meant “to dress,” “to clothe”; the etymology of invest literally means “in clothes”).

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

Hence investiture of bishops or to invest someone with power.

csydas• 3 years ago

I don't think such a semantic argument is necessary; invest just means you're committing resources to get benefits, it's not purely a financial arrangement.

I'm positive in your work you think in terms of resource investments and payoffs to better understand whether a project is worth continuing with, and that's exactly what the article means.

A smart home system is definitely an investment in my mind, and the payoff is a more comfortable and easier life. That is all the article is saying; the financial, time, and mental resources are no longer going to be invested into Google smart home products as the investment does not return the desired benefits and even leaves you with a net-negative.

egypturnash2• 3 years ago

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

- Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms

Sounds like a sensible investment to me. You spent a lot on some hella nice boots and if you don't care about keeping up with style, you can amortize their cost over a lot more use than someone who can only afford cheap, shitty boots.

cromka• 3 years ago

It is only a matter of time before a class action is filed against Google for reducing the functionality of products they previously sold. The Assistant in Mini speakers I use at home has become amusingly bad: not that it doesn’t understand what I want, but it will often just not execute my orders, despite understanding. For example, it recently ignores my “yes” to its “do you want to know more?” follow up questions. They keep messing it up, it used to be way better few years back.

tjpnz• 3 years ago

More likely people are just going to stop using their products.

c4mpute2• 3 years ago

I think for a lawsuit to happen there would need to be some interested law firm to organize things. For them to be interested, there would need to be money in it, that means payout times number of participants. However, since nobody except a few buys google's home automation, the number of participants is too low to result in a relevant size.

marak830• 3 years ago

Against googles lawyers?

It would require a massive amount of pissed off consumers, and a huge team to even drag them to court.

End result would be google paying a pittance and no one getting anything.

End of the day, a lot of lawyers would be paid well and google would shrug it off as a cost of business.

sirius87• 3 years ago

With all this talk of ChatGPT clearing law school exams and all, I'd love to see a legal fight of lawyers armed with AI against "googles lawyers". I believe that'd be a net good.

For everyone else in tech, I suppose we can all vow to never purchase Google products as gifts for family.

GavinMcG• 3 years ago

Class actions don't need a huge number of people to lead the charge. That's the point: most people can do nothing, while their interests are represented.

I think it would be best if wrongdoers had to make consumers whole and also pay the costs of holding them accountable. But our system currently doesn't work that way, and in that context, it's still worthwhile to have lawyers motivated to raising the cost of wrongdoing.

akhosravian• 3 years ago

Maybe instead of hoping for a lawsuit just stop buying shit google makes. They’ve repeatedly dropped whole product lines on short notice, and even the Android phones they have produced have sometimes had pathetically short supported lives.

Drakim2• 3 years ago

So you buy something else like Nest, and then google buys the company and removes your functionality anyways.

That is, if vendor lock in will even allow you to get some other product without having to replace every device in your home (and hope this new vendor doesn't do the exact same within a few years).

Fair consumer protection regulations are necessary in modern society, the "vote with your wallet" strategy doesn't scale.

unyttigfjelltol• 3 years ago

The Google Play store is the chokepoint for Android. I maybe can get roughly the right functionality via an alternate app repo, but there's always going to be some mass consumer app that's important and unsupported, or some glitch or incompatibility. There ought to be law....

hackernewds3• 3 years ago

The old Google Mini don't even connect to the Google Home app anymore, which is necessary to chain it to Wifi connection. For a <5 year old product - that's unacceptable

Sosh101• 3 years ago

I can't understand people that want to wire up every aspect of their home to big tech cloud companies. There are plenty of options for self-hosted smart home setups.

visarga• 3 years ago

When I realized I need to register all my light bulbs and appliances and control them by janky wireless signals, with reconnect issues from time to time, I just gave up and use physical switches. They work all the time. Why would I want to open or close a light when I am 100 steps away from the button?

bombcar3• 3 years ago

You can get physical switches that are ALSO software controllable, which can be nice. Things like these: https://www.lutron.com/en-US/Products/Pages/SingleRoomContro...

So you can do "Siri turn all lights off" or whatever, and still be able to turn the lights on and off if the Internet is down.

Still on the fence if it's worth the cost.

somat• 3 years ago

My plan is to physically wire everything into a controllable switch.

Then I started thinking, what sort of switch is programmatically controllable, uses open standards has a large number of ports is vendor interchangeable. and it hit me. a POE ethernet switch.

Now I just have to find a source of 48V leds.

hashtag: only_half_joking.

ianburrell• 3 years ago

You can get smart switches, they require wiring but they work as switches without smart system. I have Zigbee and ZWave and both have been reliable.

I primarily use the remote to turn on light switches from across the room. It only saves a couple of steps but the seconds add up. The big one is turning on porch light at night while standing on porch. I have turned off left on lights on way to airport. I have also set up routine to turn on lights in evening while I’m away.

vxNsr4• 3 years ago

As someone who is fairly tech literate, and has his own home server. I disagree. Self hosting still isn’t anywhere near consumer friendly enough to be a mainstream option for most people.

indeyets2• 3 years ago

The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once

https://www.home-assistant.io/

toyg• 3 years ago

I have a Google Hub and 2 Minis , would I be able to repurpose them for HA or do I have to start from scratch...? If they can't be reused, I might as well stick to Google until they get bricked (which I'm sure will happen at some point).

jon-wood2• 3 years ago

Currently, no, but HA will integrate with them and expose any devices to Google’s ecosystem (even if they don’t natively support that). You can also use devices with a screen as dashboards for HA.

zamalek• 3 years ago

I use Google devices with my HA setup just fine (although I want to move away). HA just added integrated assistant support, so I'm keen to try that out when I get back from vacation.

amf122• 3 years ago

Yep, HA has a lot of integrations to connect to different ecosystems. Fair warning though, setting it up and making it work requires good amount of work. I spent way too much time for on it for my basic needs and eventually gave up.

bobsoap• 3 years ago

That's presumably because HA is categorically outside the author's field of view, not being a branded corporate plug'n'play product with a marketing budget, but open-source with "DIY" in the first paragraph on the page.

I don't think the author is interested in providing alternative solutions at all. This article reads like a cry for attention directed at Google and no one else.

dustincoates• 3 years ago

He says in a linked post that he is using Home Assistant: https://www.androidauthority.com/affordable-connected-smart-...

neop1x• 3 years ago

I happily use Home Assistant + Sonoff ZigBee Bridge PRO + Zigbee2mqtt + other integrations. It is a fully offline vendor-independent solution.

buro9• 3 years ago

I feel like I've been slowly de-Googling for many years now.

A decade ago I was all-in, Chromecast Audio, Android, GSuite for a personal domain, Photos, Maps, Home products when they emerged. I'd made a bet that software could improve faster than hardware and chose to be as free in my choice of hardware as possible (Linux on a variety of machines and to bet on web software) rather than choosing a potentially more polished but closed world (Apple or Microsoft). Google for me, offered a third way.

But all I learned is that the massive disconnect between units within Google would result in an experience that worsened itself on a continual basis.

At first I thought it was all due to the "Google for your Domain" account as it became clear that GSuite was becoming a corp only thing.

So I migrated to a Gmail account https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...

But... that didn't solve things!

I got more things working, but they then felt like they diverged with limited experiences in different areas. The recognition that a home is multi-person came very late, and it's clunky.

Google Music shuttered, and I could no longer upload the things that I had which they did not. So I moved to ripping my own CDs (this took 3 years!!!) and then a NAS + Plex (love this!).

Gmail removed all of the personal domain things and a big redirect chain from GSuite through Gmail made debugging a missing email a pain plus so many stories about email being closed and shuttering the whole account, so I moved to Fastmail (love this!).

Photos got worse (and BTW you cannot get the photos out at the same quality as you put them in unless you individually download each one!!!), so I'm now using Syncthing + NAS + Plex (it's OK for photos, not great TBH).

Drive felt like it stagnated and improvements in GSuite (my work accounts) didn't feel like they hit the personal accounts (the GMail one). I moved to Syncthing + NAS (love this!), and actually opted for a Microsoft account for Office 365 (but I don't use OneDrive).

Home automation was severely dented with the Sonos battle, so now all of that is Home Assistant for me (it's pretty good — still more for the advanced tinkerer than the average person in UX though).

As the Sonos battle produced it's outcome I realised that actually running different things like bluetooth or PlexAmp headless works better for remote control... and honestly, Google weren't providing a great audio experience (Cast doesn't play media at it's highest quality levels and you can't get a raw digital out signal from Google's own products except a TOSlink on Chromecast Audio which is now unsupported and locked the rate to 44Khz and required upsampling in the subsequent DAC).

By Google's constant fumbling here I am a decade later with very few Google products in my life. I'm down to maps (which I keep because of stars) but am increasingly using OsmAnd+, Android (but I'm open to considering an iPhone next time as case availability is an issue with Pixel devices after 1-2 years and my phones last longer than that), and my Nest doorbell (don't get me started on how bad the Nest integration has been!).

I'm not rejecting Google as much as they seem to be rejecting their users. I'm just listening to what they seem to be telling me... which is that they really do not want end consumers as customers, and that's fine because many companies do and things like Fastmail, Plex, Syncthing, Signal, etc are all phenomenal and I pay or donate to all.

This isn't death by a thousand paper cuts, it's death by a million paper cuts. Other products may be a little worse, but as they aren't causing paper cuts constantly they feel joyful to use by comparison.

meerita• 3 years ago

I switched from my iPhone 5 to a Google Nexus when Material Design came out, and quickly grew to love Google. However, after 10 years, I began to have security concerns and didn't like the idea of using Google anymore. So, I switched back to Apple and found that everything was more integrated with more features, better privacy and security. I even switched all my accounts to the new iCloud email and stopped using Gmail.

jicka• 3 years ago

I had a similar journey.

I started by having my files on hard drives and transporting them wherever I went. Everything was local. I ran cyanogenmod on my phone and tinkered to customize all my devices to my exact needs.

Then came a time where I pushed it all to the cloud. Gmail, maps, onedrive,Netflix, Philipps Hue, Chromecasts, official android ROMs.

In the past year, I've moved back. Data is on a NAS, I buy mp3s and Blu-rays to put them on Plex. Home-Assistant has taken over my home and I'm back with LineageOS. I'm happier this way. Everything takes more time to setup, but I can do things I couldn't before and I'm free from anything becoming discontinued.

Compared to when I started, it's become so much easier to do things your way.

asah• 3 years ago

Google Photos now stores original quality:

"Photos and videos are stored in the same resolution that you took them with no change to their quality. Photos and videos backed up in Original quality count toward your Google Account storage."

lima• 3 years ago

and BTW you cannot get the photos out at the same quality as you put them in

You can get the original photos out, but they're either making it annoying on purpose, or just don't care:

- When you download a photo through the web UI, you get the original file, metadata and all, but there's no way of batch-downloading everything.

- Google Takeout will give you the original image and the metadata, but they store them separately, and make no effort to put them back together and you have to do it yourself using one of many third-party tools. Given that they have the code to do it, this feels very hostile indeed.

rscrawfo• 3 years ago

Last time I tried Plex for photos it was pretty terrible.

Clearly not their focus. I still use it for audiobooks and live tv, but I migrated photos to photoprism which is great.

Also check out photo structure. The author posts here sometimes. Both are great apps.

rcarmo3• 3 years ago

I recently went and got a couple of Lenovo ThinkSmart View displays off eBay and re-purposed them: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330

The reason I got them was that I wanted small desktop displays to both replace my “now playing” Raspberry Pi display and act as smart speakers, and there didn’t seem to be anything event in the market (there are plenty of cheap Chinese tablets, but I wanted something with a standalone PSU and a proper speaker).

These are not Google Home devices (they run Android Things, but a “corporate” version tailored for Teams and Zoom calling) but they are functionally equivalent and surprisingly capable. After installing Firefox and PlexAmp, they do everything I could possibly want from a kitchen-top display, and I am considering getting another one.

Like the OP, I am fascinated with the fact that Google keeps shooting itself in the foot regarding home devices—-these things are as capable as any Android tablet and far more useful if you install a browser, so I honestly don’t see the point of nerfing them with fancy “home” UIs that do absolutely nothing useful.

If Google stopped messing with its partners and standardized on a a more open, more third-party friendly Android Things release with just a browser, a media player and the Play Store (plus maybe a better “family” calendar UI, which I baked in with an Outlook web view), I’m betting there would be plenty of cheap Chinese clones as well…

And they are more reliable to boot, since you won’t forget to charge them (no, a tablet on a dock isn’t the same thing).

goodpoint• 3 years ago

“now playing”?

rcarmo3• 3 years ago

Third link in the post: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/12/01/1920

JoBrad2• 3 years ago

That’s really cool. Thanks for sharing!

vineyardmike2• 3 years ago

I honestly don’t see the point of nerfing them with fancy “home” UIs that do absolutely nothing useful.

A big reason for the home UIs is to optimize for a different use case. I never use my home displays as a tablet and just use them for smart home stuff. An app launcher or generic tablet UX would just slow down a voice-forward interaction.

rcarmo3• 3 years ago

You can easily replace those with tailored web pages - I am using the Homebridge UI on mine now,

The point there is that restricting the devices to a single-purpose UI destroys their value and flexibility over time. Adding a home dashboard is fine, but removing the ability to do anything else is not.

Brosper• 3 years ago

This website is full of Ads. On my M2 is lagging and can't scroll thought.

bell-cot4• 3 years ago

A js-blocking browser extension makes the modern web far more user-friendly.

BLKNSLVR• 3 years ago

Or pihole / adguard, which retains a level of usability that's unfortunately not present when blocking JS .

(I block JS by default, but have to allow it for so many things).

haunter• 3 years ago

I'm genuinly surprised that there are people on HN without a content blocker

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Nursie• 3 years ago

I gave up on Google’s stuff when Nest decided they were no longer going to function with google domain accounts. It had been fine for years, then there was an interruption in my subscription for some reason and I couldn’t re-subscribe.

After multiple opaque “Sorry, not working, maybe try later messages, eventually it became clear from support forums that someone at Nest had decided that google managed domains == company email, and we aren’t going to support that because your boss might watch the feeds. Never mind if you’re using it at a company. Never mind if you’re using your domain for a family (as they used to recommend was a great use for “Google for Domains”!).

Any time they were challenges they just doubled down.

Ok bye then…

timellis-smith• 3 years ago

For me this is also a major failure of poor competition policy.

If Google's smart home system were an independent company, it would love or die by its ability to do its job. But Nest can just piggy back on Google's brand power.

kwertyoowiyop• 3 years ago

As Lily Tomlin used to say in her comedy skits: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company!”

bombcar3• 3 years ago

BestBuy killed their IoT HomeKit compatible switches and stuff years ago, but they 1. still work and 2. still work with HomeKit if they were installed/connected before they took down the IoT servers.

smitty1e• 3 years ago

In this sense, we live in a giant laser printer, and are all RMS: lacking source code makes it ridiculously hard for us to function in the face of product discontinuation.

Thought balloon: should companies be legally forced to escrow their source code with the government, so that the public is left less in the lurch?

spicyusername• 3 years ago

Google is the new IBM.

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

Not really. The only thing google has ever been unambiguously successful (profitable at all?) at is ads, although PageRank was pretty good for the year or three that it worked. IBM has accomplished a ton of things.

jimmcslim2• 3 years ago

What are the open, easy to install and use, and sustainable alternatives? It feels like enough work has been done on the margins of replicating some of the capabilities of Alexa and Google Nest hardware and software, but it’s not packaged up in an accessible way for the mass-market?

btreecat• 3 years ago

I've been running home assistant for years now.

BrandoElFollito3• 3 years ago

To be fair (and I run HA for years with an extensive set of devices), the voice part works best with Google (or probably Alexa, but I do not use Alexa).

I tried Mycroft a few years ago but for one it was a hit or miss, and two there are no simple hardware devices to use it with.

jimmcslim2• 3 years ago

Yeah, Home Assistant is great.

My question is... where is the nicely packaged, off the shelf, easy to use but open to expansion voice assistant that works with it?

elif• 3 years ago

One day I fully expect to wake up to find my phone issuing me the warning "Google Fi has been discontinued. Please find an alternative carrier by the end of the month"

"Google Photos has been replaced by our new service, Google Pixa. Please back up your photos as they cannot be transferred to our new service"

It's almost like their project/team structure depends on cannibalisation.

I already lost my wedding playlist (2019) because Google decided to rebrand Google Play to YouTube Music.

everybodyknows• 3 years ago

lost my wedding playlist

It's the new industry normal. Amazon Prime Music zeroed out all user's investment of time spent crafting playlists, five months back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33521374

esalman• 3 years ago

I have used Google products for free all my life. In last year or so I was forced to pay for two products - one is my wife's Google Fi phone and another is a friend's Google apps suite.

Both of these are ticking time bombs. These are like sensitive data that you haven't backed up. Might end in catastrophe any time. My wife's contract should be up sometime next year and that's when she'll switch to a different carrier. I also might migrate from Google apps by the end of next month.

climb_stealth• 3 years ago

Man, don't even say that! I'm seriously worried about Google Photos going away. I'm running Ente in parallel but it just isn't there yet. Especially on iOS.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

A good reminder that any of your data that exists solely in the cloud is at risk. If you're into using the cloud to store stuff, be sure to keep a copy of that stuff locally as well.

hsjqllzlfkf2• 3 years ago

In this thread: people invest time into a free product and then complain that they get rugged.

cowsandmilk• 3 years ago

How are the devices Google is selling “free”? The backend services supporting them were bundled as features of the device and are part of why people paid money for the devices.

hsjqllzlfkf2• 3 years ago

Did I say devices? Or did I say products?

xchip• 3 years ago

yeah, another half-ass solution were the business model is to monitor you as much as possible by offering as less as possible

31337Logic• 3 years ago

Thank you, Google, for dropping support on your OnHub products. I was able to pick up a few, cheaply, from your angry users.

I haven't bought a single home device from Google and have no desire to. But Google's utter lack of direction in this department means I now have 3 decent pieces of hardware running OpenWRT. Thanks again! ;-)

eimrine3• 3 years ago

I believe in a future where homes are connected, smarter, and automated enough not to require switches (...)

An average switch can work probably more than an average human, not requires any king-for-a-day with their blessed updates and even continues to work when the supplier stops his business. This article maybe should be not about Google but about any IoT because you can do all kinds of automatization with the power supply to your 120V/230V stuff just on your DIN rail on your switchboard and you know what? Stuff on DIN rail will continue its work even if your counry will be invaded by Ruscists with problems such as rolling blackouts, bad Internet connection, or if your location considered to be under some embargo, or even if the master of the home has been killed and somebody (such as certified electrician) must to figure out how this automatization works (I mean that no electrician can do anything to your switchboard if there are no switches).

The aforementioned update on the Lenovo Smart Display nerfed the one thing I used it most for — streaming web video content in the kitchen.

Why to use this walled-garden approach? You can use use any upto 15yo laptop on x86 architecture with some free and open source OS, or you can use any non-Smart display with Raspberry-like computer which obviously is going to serve you as long as Raspberry's video coprocessor will keep supporting actual Youtube's video codec.

I struggle to understand what Google is thinking; the upgrade cycle for a security system should be measured in ten-plus years, if not more.

What an ugly lie! Security systems should be shaped in such a way that no guy except you has an access to a root.

DocTomoe• 3 years ago

You can use use any upto 15yo laptop on x86 architecture with some free and open source OS, or you can use any non-Smart display with Raspberry-like computer which obviously is going to serve you as long as Raspberry's video coprocessor will keep supporting actual Youtube's video codec.

Which is all nice and cool as long as only tech geeks live in a household. The moment you are trying to make an aesthetically pleasing home, old monitors and green electronics boards are a no-go.

eimrine3• 3 years ago

This is a battle of aesthetically-looking stuff but not yours vs long-living stuff but having wires and boards everywhere. Former has some aestetics on surfare level but malware on deep levels. Latter looks like crap but has some aestetics on deep level. Everybody has his deepness of sensivity to aestetics.

nickpeterson• 3 years ago

I’d haven’t really considered this angle, but if ChatGPT is an existential threat to Google search, we’re probably going to see signs that Google is ignoring even more if these side projects.

doctor_eval3• 3 years ago

All these dead products could have been creating a revenue moat against the fall of ad revenue and the onset of a competitor. But they pissed away decades of innovation through poor product management, bad incentives, and such hubris like the world has never seen.

We’re seeing Google reap what they have sowed. What a waste.

account-52• 3 years ago

This sort of shit is the reason they will never get me to use their passkey implementation.

The sooner there's a truly portable open source offline version of passkeys I'm all in. Until then I'm sticking with my password manager.

I do feel the only thing you can really trust from Google are the things that make them money. Chrome, and any software that allows them to hook into for advertising money. It makes me worry about go, dart, and flutter. Though the latter two include analytics which you need to disable.

ssbash• 3 years ago

I believe security keys are the offline version of passkeys you're looking for.

I am afraid that websites will somehow disable support security keys and only support passkey implementations from big tech (similar to how websites only offer signin with google, fb , etc).

Can someone clarify if WebAuthn protocol allows for this filtering against hardware authenticators?

blibble• 3 years ago

yes, there's an attestation cert as part of the register request

vineyardmike2• 3 years ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right, but I think it’s not all bad to only use auth from big tech - I don’t know if I trust most small companies to implement uname/password auth correctly. Most users recycle passwords too so a leak is really bad.

I think the reason to only support big tech passkey auth is because users (at scale) can’t be trusted to keep track of their hardware keys.

pabs32• 3 years ago

There is a pull request for adding passkeys to KeePassXC:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/8825

account-52• 3 years ago

Amazing thanks for this, I was unaware. Hopefully not too long.

SloopJon• 3 years ago

Interesting to see that passkeys make use of CBOR. When I looked at binary JSONs several years ago, Smile was one of my favorites, but CBOR was decent too.

anon050723• 3 years ago

I've been really happy with a Hubitat Elevation[1], controlling misc z-wave and zigbee devices. I've had mine for over three years and it continues to get updates[2].

Nearly every device I've considered has had either a provided or community written driver[3] available.

1: https://hubitat.com/ 2: https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-2-3-5-available/1133... 3: https://community.hubitat.com/t/custom-device-drivers-wiki

phantomics• 3 years ago

You either die an innovator, or you live long enough to see yourself become a Yahoo.

nbzso2• 3 years ago

The biggest unanswered question for me in recent years is how educated people with a tech background have trusted a big corporation which publicly stated years ago that they existence goal is to build the digital GOD (AGI). It's beyond my imagination. The same with OpenAI craze now. Why I would give my personal or corporate information to them or Microsoft? To learn more about my process patterns and RLHF their models for free? I understand the normies, they have no clue. But this?

eimrine3• 3 years ago

There is a good article [1] just has been spawned on "New", maybe it answers your question.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35850843

meindnoch• 3 years ago

Maybe "educated people with a tech background" aren't as intelligent as you thought?

nbzso2• 3 years ago

Uncomfortably, after leading several teams I lean to this direction, but I never forget that I am biased too.

SergeAx• 3 years ago

I love this approach. While the device is in use - it is ours, and you cannot open, repair, modify it of its firmware. When we discontinue it - it is your problem, we got your money, end of story.

vachina• 3 years ago

I think a good rule of thumb is not investing in any hardware which has its functionality depend on someone else’s RPC endpoint, especially for something as trivial as switching things on and off.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

The Google specific issues aside I wonder if the average smart-home enthusiast will ever make 10% of the money and time back they apparently invest into their smart homes.

To me this isn't really about a single company, it's about shoving so much tech into your home that barely does anything it's no wonder something always breaks. How many years of uninterrupted light switch pressing do you need to do before this actually pays off?

nologic01• 3 years ago

I read 'smart phone' instead of 'smart home' and for a brief blissful moment I thought, wow, what did I miss? Is this the year of the linux phone?

Old enough to live perfectly well without a smart home but alas young enough so impossible to live without a smart phone.

jacooper• 3 years ago

Step by step, my goal is to build out an entirely self-hosted ecosystem.

The only viable way.

chkaloon• 3 years ago

Home Assistant. Definitely DIY, but works great

Saris• 3 years ago

Everyone should be wary of anything google (or really any company) makes, and ask yourself "what happens when they stop supporting this".

Their phones are fine, those are easily flashed with many other ROMs. But anything locked down like smart home stuff should be avoided.

Same with any online services that don't easily support data export to something else.

benknight87• 3 years ago

This doesn't even mention the fact that even 7 years in, the UX is a daily nightmare, for me at least.

* My speakers randomly don't show up as options when casting * With two speakers in my house, they often both answer at the same time or one of them waits a few seconds and says something went wrong * Bluetooth randomly stops working sometimes and requires a power cycle.

The list goes on.

ikesau• 3 years ago

There's an uncanny SEO-optimizing style to this article. Reminds me of this scene from Return of the Killer Tomatoes

https://youtu.be/pXzsYIBVUB0?t=3841

pavel_lishin• 3 years ago

Yeah, it feels like the whole thing could have been two paragraphs.

And why is there a poll at the start?

kderbyma• 3 years ago

Google will be dead soon. They will need a to resurrect something besides an inanimate corpse.....But again. HR doesn't care...neither does anyone who hires anyone...and most of all...neither do the execs.

it's a dying horse they are trying to ride into town....

snthd• 3 years ago

Google don't make smart home products, they make cloud home products.

burntalmonds• 3 years ago

I recently bought a Nest thermostat and regret it. Two months in and the wifi went bad. Apparently a common problem. Support agrees to send me a replacement, but they end up sending it to the wrong address.

sshumaker• 3 years ago

I had the same issue, but support kept disconnecting me and I had to start all over again going through the entire “try all of the brain dead stuff like resetting” 3 times, before I finally gave up and just ordered a new Nest and ate the cost.

doctor_eval3• 3 years ago

Why did you buy the same device after a bad experience? That’s just encouraging the fuckers.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

These days I find it really hard to not immediately respond with ‘I dunno what you expected to happen’.

Is there someone still building anything that relies on a given Google service still being around and working in a year?

rch5• 3 years ago

Something about Google's incentive structure is eating them alive.

For instance, there's an alarm setting on Android (Pixel) for "Night Mode: Very dim display (for dark rooms)".

Which I interpret as a Googler's way of saying: "my bonus is tied to minutes of display visibility while charging, so F users there's no way to turn the display off."

maxerickson2• 3 years ago

On my Pixel, there's a "Keep the Screen Dark" in the digital well being settings. It's nested 4 screens in or whatever, but it's there.

Going from an older device to a Pixel 6, I would say that there is some additional complexity in the settings, but directionally, the changes make the device nicer to use.

So like the setting in the alarm isn't the overall device control, it's deep in the digital well being settings (complexity), but there is a way to set the phone to be less disruptive, with quite a bit of control (directionally correct).

rch5• 3 years ago

I had used an option like that, until about 6 months ago IIRC. It's gone now.

However I've just found something under Settings - Accessibility that might mitigate the problem a little more. Extra dim: dim screen beyond your phone's minimum brightness.

It still won't really be off though, most likely.

And the text labels on these settings belong in a Monty Python sketch about product management.

freetinker• 3 years ago

You’re not too far off with this example…

linsomniac3• 3 years ago

My primary use of the Home speakers is playing music in the shower. That experience is actually pretty bad though, over the years between google music and spotify, getting it to play my music is just horribly obtuse. I can't reliably get it to start my music. "Playing a playlist called my favorites" or similar rather than playing my own playlist.

At one point after 3-4 failed attempts like this I said "F you" and the speaker said "Don't speak to me like that." So I unplugged it.

devoutsalsa2• 3 years ago

I still want profanity mode. Hurling insults at a Google Assistant and having to roast me in return would be amazing.

linsomniac3• 3 years ago

That's not really what I'm looking for, of course. At the time it was feeling a bit like "3 times is enemy action". A person, if I had asked them to play my playlist and they put on "KidzBopz" or other "decidedly not my playlists", they'd be like "Ok, I've pushed this gag far enough."

But seriously, I still haven't plugged that thing back in, it's been over a year. The only reliable way I could get to start my playlists was to use my phone, at which point I might as well just be using a bluetooth speaker, which is what I've been doing the last year.

LightBug1• 3 years ago

"Fuck you, Dave. Fuuuuuuuck you!!!!! You and your shitty little ReVanced app"

That would be pretty awesome.

lodovic• 3 years ago

It should not respond like with "don't talk to me like that". It is a device, not a person, it has no feelings, and it is being used in a private home. No reason to police speech there.

riskable• 3 years ago

I never understood why people put smart speakers in their showers. Why is a simple and cheap Bluetooth speaker not good enough? You can get them in any size and shape and sound quality and they (can) work with your phone's built-in "smart" assistant. I never use that though because when I'm in the shower all I want to do is listen to music.

Here's my routine, for reference:

    1. Turn on the speaker (which is hanging on my tile shower wall via an Ikea suction cup hook).
    2. Open Spotify on my phone and start a playlist and adjust the volume if necessary (it remembers the volume I last set for this particular Bluetooth speaker so I rarely have to touch that).
    3. Take a shower (singing and dancing of course!)
    4. Turn off the speaker.
    5. Leave the bathroom with my phone.

It works fantastically well. If a song comes on I don't like I can just push the button on the speaker to go to the next track. I can even answer phone calls on it if I want (which I never do).

JoBrad2• 3 years ago

Because I don’t have to remember to pair my phone with the Bluetooth speaker, then queue up whatever. I just tell my Echo to play my daily briefing, and it does the work. I picked a set that is generally done in 15-20 minutes, so it doubles as a good time for my morning routine.

ericpauley• 3 years ago

I’ve just started playing music on my phone. The iPhone is plenty water resistant now and it’s not going under the shower stream anyway.

Larrikin3• 3 years ago

I think it is mostly iOS people that are not used to waterproof phones. Many top quality Android phones have been water resistant for years. My first one was the Sony Xperia Z1 released a decade ago.

So, controlling a speaker from your phone in the shower is an obvious solution versus trying to talk to it.

stirlo2• 3 years ago

Thats still more steps than just walking in and yelling out "Hey Google, play my music"

bastawhiz• 3 years ago

I've done both, and what you've described is far more effort than just shouting a command.

ketzu• 3 years ago

It is fine and works well. I mostly got the smart speakers because i wanted multi room audio for my spotify, and alexa is the cheapest decent quality multi room audio I could get.

Also, my morning routine since I have them has simplified: Go to the bathroom in the morning, my presence detection will start my morning playlist as I enter. (Turning off not included in example, either switch playlist via spotify app at some point or tell alexa/spotify to turn off for a meeting or because I leave.)

julianeon• 3 years ago

Why a smart speaker?

I have Alexa, a Dot device, which works great - never any problems - with Spotify. I think it's better than Bluetooth speaker, yeah.

Because of the timers. I can ask it to set a timer for shampoo or condition, 3 minutes, or washing my teeth, 2 minutes.

But also I can request a song by name, and for many songs it works.

It basically works as well as a Bluetooth speaker, for the same cost, but with more functionality. Pretty easy choice.

paulmooreparks• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm weird, but my showers don't last more than a song or two (and I shave in the shower), so any effort to play music, smart speaker or dumb, is kind of wasted.

tacocataco• 3 years ago

I feel like if a product is abandoned it should become freeware for all to use so the electronic devices involved have a less of a chance to become ewaste.

Kind of how copyright (was supposed to) work, giving access to the public eventually.

surajrmal• 3 years ago

Unfortunately it's often not entirely up to the company to decide. They likely use components and software written by various other companies which require strict controls over who may have access to it. The nature of those contracts would have to change first.

midoridensha2• 3 years ago

It should be easy to pass a law that makes all these contracts null and void. The end-users' rights should be supreme.

If the companies making components don't like this, they should be more careful about who they sell components to.

erocs• 3 years ago

If this isn't a straightforward anti-competitive lawsuit I don't know what would be.

GrumpyNl• 3 years ago

I had to, manually, disable over 50 cookies on that site, crazy.

fencepost• 3 years ago

The only thing Google can be depended on to do with lower volume products and services is kill them. The same seems to apply to services with no way to run ads.

I'm kind of amazed that Google Voice is still around, though at this point it may be tied in with Google Fi and letting them lean on each other.

chaostheory2• 3 years ago

For me this feeling happened after they killed Nest Secure

coldtea• 3 years ago

Pro tip: unless you have some handicaps and need the extra automation, don't invest in any "smart home" ecosystem. They are dumb, and more trouble than worth it.

riemannzeta3• 3 years ago

Their position in the Sonos lawsuits is looking pretty stubborn and selfish at this point. Just pay for a license rather than inconveniencing your customers. They should be working together rather than fighting over a royalty that's relatively small to Google and huge to Sonos. Seems stupid to me.

riemannzeta3• 3 years ago

The ultimate question for consumers though is this: Are you better off in the Apple ecosystem? As bad as things are with Google, the answer is probably no. But not many have the time, tools, and training to be independent of either.

WA• 3 years ago

So far, the answer actually seems to be yes. But maybe you can clarify your metric by which you measure "better off".

Larrikin3• 3 years ago

You are not better off in one walled garden over the other. With greedy corporations in the US pushing subscriptions for products that get discontinued and China spinning up cheap crap companies everyday, there is zero reason to invest in anything IoT in your home that is not fully open sourced or completely cracked.

Currently the best indicator is checking Home assistant's or ESPHome's integrations. I'm a little worried that they are guided by one company, Nabu Casa, but atleast the product is open source so the community can take over if they pull an OpenAI and completely reverse. They cater to a very combative group of customers that will absolutely take over the product if they get greedy.

microtonal• 3 years ago

I dug out an old Airport Extreme when a Fritz!Box at the office had some issues. It worked fine as ever and even better, there was even a security update waiting. The device is from 2013.

The third generation Apple TV from 2012 had 120 months of updates (the last update was Apple TV Software 7.9 in March 2022).

So at the very least it sounds like they are doing pretty ok.

michelledepeil• 3 years ago

This is, imo, not a google-problem, but a non-FLOSS problem.

gumby• 3 years ago

FTA:

“Google’s directionless approach”

This phrase has applied to all parts of google since the departure of Schmidt.

I used to think it was a shame, but eventually realized we’ve been lucky.

cfeduke• 3 years ago

Google has done the same thing to Nest Secure. I removed an ADT system from my office because the monthly monitoring from ADT was $39.99 - the ADT system came with the office. I installed the Nest Secure cameras and system myself, even running USB power outside the office through the masonry. The monitoring was adequate - notifications sent to my phone - and Internet storage pricing was acceptable. But as of April 2024 the service is being shut down and I can opt to have an ADT system installed - a $485 value! - and pay a monthly monitoring fee. (Or I can receive a $200 credit on the Google store, presumably to buy some other technology they are going to sunset.)

Corrado4• 3 years ago

Yea, the Google store credit really feels like a slap in the face. "Hey, if you liked the old thing that we took away you should purchase the new thing that we'll take away."

sagarpatil• 3 years ago

Alexa isn’t any better either. I had Alexa’s in each room and when I used to ask her to start the AC, it would start AC in some other room (this is after assigning the Alexa and AC to that particular room). That right there is a deal breaker for me, I can’t keep telling my guests every time what’s the room called and have them remember it.

Corrado4• 3 years ago

Alexa is weird this way. It has the ability to assign things to certain areas, it's just hard to figure out how to make it happen. For example, I have Alexa controlled lights in my basement and it knows what to turn on when I say "Turn on the lights" while in my basement. I also have Alexa controlled lights in my garage, and until recently I specifically had to tell it "Turn on the garage lights" while standing in my garage. However, I made a change recently (I can't remember what it was) and now my garage auto-magically knows that I'm talking about it's lights while I'm in the garage.

So, I think Alexa has the ability to know which A/C unit your talking about while standing in the room, but it's not clear how to make it happen. Also, it sometimes stops working, even after you have it configured correctly; that's the real frustrating part!

grrdotcloud• 3 years ago

Every device in each room has a different trigger wake word. That eliminated them being triggered by proximity.

Then each smart device has a unique name based upon their function. Dog names or primary user.

Echo/Computer/Alexia, turn on Fido (outdoor lights)

Pairing by voice is also helpful.

kkfx• 3 years ago

Two notes:

- only open standard design can operate together with not-too-much issues;

- actual state of home automation is a directionless mess.

About the first point: the most common protocol for "smart devices"/home appliances, those who can actually talk to something else regardless of the vendor is ModBUS, a serial protocol from the '70s. The newer MQTT, Kafka etc are very rarely supported on commercial devices. Long story short: the sole way we can get different tools from different OEMs playing together is that such interoperability is mandatory by law, carefully tested, with sanctions when found absent. Without that NO OEM will really be interoperable with anything, it's own products together included.

For the second point: MOST home automation is just about flipping switches with some logic behind, the rest is just monitoring. A VERY SIMPLE THING, unfortunately almost no vendor and perhaps also most designers have no clue about how and what to automate. Even the more expensive and trendy tools, like p.v. systems to be potentially integrated with car charging systems etc aren't really integrated even under a single OEM umbrella.

Essentially: just invest in home automation if you really want to do something and be prepared to long frustration, high costs and unreliable, fragile stuff.

erickf1• 3 years ago

I stopped using Google products a long time ago. Seeing articles like this and hearing what others are dealing with just encourages me to see that I made the right choice.

mulmen• 3 years ago

Why would anyone have trusted Google on this in the first place? It’s such an obvious outcome I struggle to understand how anyone expected anything different. This is why we have open standards and interoperability. Imagine if you can only buy lamps from IKEA because your whole house has proprietary outlets. Who signs up for that?

devoutsalsa2• 3 years ago

People in the 60s: the government will wiretap your home.

People now: hey wire tap, can cats eat pancakes?

pessimizer3• 3 years ago

I remember when discussions about surveillance involved obscure facts about the actual construction of an ancient device called a "pen register." Now you're a Russian spy if you don't think the CIA should be placing employees in the C-suites of all communications companies.

The amount of control and surveillance we inflicted on the children of the 90s has become the new expectation for adult citizens.

einpoklum• 3 years ago

I'm never lending money to Bernie Madoff again!

Animats• 3 years ago

If your Google account is cancelled, do you freeze in the dark?

AbrahamParangi• 3 years ago

Reminder that Google is an ad company with a large number of hobbies. You cannot trust Google to continue doing anything that doesn’t generate (directly or indirectly) substantial ad revenue.

opmelogy• 3 years ago

Google has a history of killing off products that are actively used by people. The trust is broken at this point. I'm super weary of relying on Google for anything now.

allenrb• 3 years ago

How can it not be obvious by now that if you want to control the experience, you need to own and control the hardware and software?

Why would anyone ever trust anything else to remain stable over the long term?

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

Let's be fair to a small degree: Every goddamn "smarthome" vendor is doing fake open, embrace and extend, partial protocol, hidden preference for its hardware, scummy foot dragging on good standards.

It's just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership, its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and complete lack of commitment to the recipe.

ouid• 3 years ago

because its dumb to put a computer whose behavior you cannot check and which regularly receives "updates" in charge of something that couldn't even be called an inconvenience before, like walking to the thermostat or flipping a lightswitch?

pers0n• 3 years ago

What happens when your smart device is 7-15+yrs old and isnt supported by anything anymore?

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

I moved off of all Google services years ago, when people were taking to Twitter and Hacker News to get support for their randomly banned GMail accounts. At that point it was already clear that Google only cares about maintaining their google/youtube/advertising dominance at all costs, and their other products only exist to confuse competitors. I'd like to run some services on Google Cloud someday, because it looks like they have a nice cloud offering, but I won't touch it because of this.

rektide2• 3 years ago

This is just what corporatism is.

Directionless ever shifting Objectives and Key Results (OKR) and forever chasing the New Addressable Market (NAM). There's plenty of believers & folks fighting for causes, but no real overall motivation for long term excellence, for building a future. No vision & no one in charge & no persistence.

Organizations are made of people, and over time and as they shift & scale, they lose direction purpose & caring, they lack the filter & will & cohesion to follow through, to tend to the affairs they set in motion. Sectors of companies rise and fall with the tides.

Google really is one of the saddest cases on the planet today. They arose from the web, from interconnectivity. They had great APIs that allowed new things to be built. And you'd think IoT/smarthome would be a perfect venue to deploy this genetic advantage, to build great apis, to help arise a new backbone of possibility. But Google has gotten worse and worse and worse at opening possibilities. G+ social network never got an API. Google smart home had a meager set of APIs and it's mostly shrunk in capabilities over time (conversely, they did (finally) land some local network apis capabilities a few years back). We're in a sad age, where security & assurability trumps possibility; Google is trying to restrict & clamp down & remove app stores, rather than enable broader possibilities. A scared company is not fun to watch.

windex• 3 years ago

Never trust google products, I will never forget losing google reader.

fennecfoxy6• 3 years ago

I agree, I went all in on nest hubs/minis etc to have assistant for making requests to control stuff. I've got a bunch of Xiaomi and custom sensors and other devices hooked up to home assistant with a relay through to Google (that I've had to pay for...because Google's home ecosystem is just fucking terrible, anybody could do better with their eyes closed).

I've noticed over time that assistant has become much dumber, is prone to misunderstanding what you say, Google sucks at hardware their wifi antennas are total crap, any minor latency between multiple assistant devices will result in them all trying to respond rather than the closest one, it's just a nightmare.

I haven't done any personal projects in a long time but I think it's about time I start playing with the OpenAI apis + whisper and see if I can't build a better assistant.

fennecfoxy6• 3 years ago

Aha, as a follow-up this conveniently appeared: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rIvB3LZiKA but still not to the degree I want. Hmmm, time to get started.

Friedduck• 3 years ago

I’ll add my lament. We use nest cameras, a nest thermostat and google WiFi. As part of their recent forced account merge our WiFi controls no longer work.

Their apps are buggy and freeze-prone, and ironically continually trying to sell more product when the existing ones don’t work well.

I’m regrettably having to replace everything to get off this treadmill. Lesson learned.

I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

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