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

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&#x27;m free to change the settings at any time.<p>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.

This sort of shit is the reason they will never get me to use their passkey implementation.<p>The sooner there&#x27;s a truly portable open source offline version of passkeys I&#x27;m all in. Until then I&#x27;m sticking with my password manager.<p>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.

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&#x27;t reliably get it to start my music. &quot;Playing a playlist called my favorites&quot; or similar rather than playing my own playlist.<p>At one point after 3-4 failed attempts like this I said &quot;F you&quot; and the speaker said &quot;Don&#x27;t speak to me like that.&quot; So I unplugged it.

I recently went and got a couple of Lenovo ThinkSmart View displays off eBay and re-purposed them: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taoofmac.com&#x2F;space&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;22&#x2F;1330" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taoofmac.com&#x2F;space&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;04&#x2F;22&#x2F;1330</a><p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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…<p>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).

The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.home-assistant.io&#x2F;</a>

One day I fully expect to wake up to find my phone issuing me the warning &quot;Google Fi has been discontinued. Please find an alternative carrier by the end of the month&quot;<p>Or<p>&quot;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&quot;<p>It&#x27;s almost like their project&#x2F;team structure depends on cannibalisation.<p>I already lost my wedding playlist (2019) because Google decided to rebrand Google Play to YouTube Music.

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.

&gt; I believe in a future where homes are connected, smarter, and automated enough not to require switches (...)<p>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&#x2F;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).<p>&gt; The aforementioned update on the Lenovo Smart Display nerfed the one thing I used it most for — streaming web video content in the kitchen.<p>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&#x27;s video coprocessor will keep supporting actual Youtube&#x27;s video codec.<p>&gt; 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.<p>What an ugly lie! Security systems should be shaped in such a way that no guy except you has an access to a root.

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

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a><p>I’m sorry but you’re asking for it when you go Google.

Something about Google&#x27;s incentive structure is eating them alive.<p>For instance, there&#x27;s an alarm setting on Android (Pixel) for &quot;Night Mode: Very dim display (for dark rooms)&quot;.<p>Which I interpret as a Googler&#x27;s way of saying: &quot;my bonus is tied to minutes of display visibility while charging, so F users there&#x27;s no way to turn the display off.&quot;

This doesn&#x27;t even mention the fact that even 7 years in, the UX is a daily nightmare, for me at least.<p>* My speakers randomly don&#x27;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.<p>The list goes on.

There&#x27;s an uncanny SEO-optimizing style to this article. Reminds me of this scene from Return of the Killer Tomatoes<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;pXzsYIBVUB0?t=3841" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;pXzsYIBVUB0?t=3841</a>

For me this is also a major failure of poor competition policy.<p>If Google&#x27;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&#x27;s brand power.

Everyone should be wary of anything google (or really any company) makes, and ask yourself &quot;what happens when they stop supporting this&quot;.<p>Their phones are fine, those are easily flashed with many other ROMs. But anything locked down like smart home stuff should be avoided.<p>Same with any online services that don&#x27;t easily support data export to something else.

I&#x27;ve been really happy with a Hubitat Elevation[1], controlling misc z-wave and zigbee devices. I&#x27;ve had mine for over three years and it continues to get updates[2].<p>Nearly every device I&#x27;ve considered has had either a provided or community written driver[3] available.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hubitat.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hubitat.com&#x2F;</a> 2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.hubitat.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;release-2-3-5-available&#x2F;113395" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.hubitat.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;release-2-3-5-available&#x2F;1133...</a> 3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.hubitat.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;custom-device-drivers-wiki" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.hubitat.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;custom-device-drivers-wiki</a>

I can&#x27;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.

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.

These days I find it really hard to not immediately respond with ‘I dunno what you expected to happen’.<p>Is there someone still building anything that relies on a given Google service still being around and working in a year?

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.<p>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”!).<p>Any time they were challenges they just doubled down.<p>Ok bye then…

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.

This is just what corporatism is.<p>Directionless ever shifting Objectives and Key Results (OKR) and forever chasing the New Addressable Market (NAM). There&#x27;s plenty of believers &amp; folks fighting for causes, but no real overall motivation for long term excellence, for building a future. No vision &amp; no one in charge &amp; no persistence.<p>Organizations are made of people, and over time and as they shift &amp; scale, they lose direction purpose &amp; caring, they lack the filter &amp; will &amp; cohesion to follow through, to tend to the affairs they set in motion. Sectors of companies rise and fall with the tides.<p>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&#x27;d think IoT&#x2F;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&#x27;s mostly shrunk in capabilities over time (conversely, they did (finally) land some local network apis capabilities a few years back). We&#x27;re in a sad age, where security &amp; assurability trumps possibility; Google is trying to restrict &amp; clamp down &amp; remove app stores, rather than enable broader possibilities. A scared company is not fun to watch.

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.

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

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?

I feel like I&#x27;ve been slowly de-Googling for many years now.<p>A decade ago I was all-in, Chromecast Audio, Android, GSuite for a personal domain, Photos, Maps, Home products when they emerged. I&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>At first I thought it was all due to the &quot;Google for your Domain&quot; account as it became clear that GSuite was becoming a corp only thing.<p>So I migrated to a Gmail account <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@buro9&#x2F;one-account-all-of-google-4d2929066951" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@buro9&#x2F;one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...</a><p>But... that didn&#x27;t solve things!<p>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&#x27;s clunky.<p>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!).<p>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!).<p>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&#x27;m now using Syncthing + NAS + Plex (it&#x27;s OK for photos, not great TBH).<p>Drive felt like it stagnated and improvements in GSuite (my work accounts) didn&#x27;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&#x27;t use OneDrive).<p>Home automation was severely dented with the Sonos battle, so now all of that is Home Assistant for me (it&#x27;s pretty good — still more for the advanced tinkerer than the average person in UX though).<p>As the Sonos battle produced it&#x27;s outcome I realised that actually running different things like bluetooth or PlexAmp headless works better for remote control... and honestly, Google weren&#x27;t providing a great audio experience (Cast doesn&#x27;t play media at it&#x27;s highest quality levels and you can&#x27;t get a raw digital out signal from Google&#x27;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).<p>By Google&#x27;s constant fumbling here I am a decade later with very few Google products in my life. I&#x27;m down to maps (which I keep because of stars) but am increasingly using OsmAnd+, Android (but I&#x27;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&#x27;t get me started on how bad the Nest integration has been!).<p>I&#x27;m not rejecting Google as much as they seem to be rejecting their users. I&#x27;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&#x27;s fine because many companies do and things like Fastmail, Plex, Syncthing, Signal, etc are all phenomenal and I pay or donate to all.<p>This isn&#x27;t death by a thousand paper cuts, it&#x27;s death by a million paper cuts. Other products may be a little worse, but as they aren&#x27;t causing paper cuts constantly they feel joyful to use by comparison.

Pro tip: unless you have some handicaps and need the extra automation, don&#x27;t invest in any &quot;smart home&quot; ecosystem. They are dumb, and more trouble than worth it.

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&#x27;s relatively small to Google and huge to Sonos. Seems stupid to me.

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

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.)

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.

FTA:<p>&gt; “Google’s directionless approach”<p>This phrase has applied to all parts of google since the departure of Schmidt.<p>I used to think it was a shame, but eventually realized we’ve been lucky.

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.

Two notes:<p>- only open standard design can operate together with not-too-much issues;<p>- actual state of home automation is a directionless mess.<p>About the first point: the most common protocol for &quot;smart devices&quot;&#x2F;home appliances, those who can actually talk to something else regardless of the vendor is ModBUS, a serial protocol from the &#x27;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&#x27;s own products together included.<p>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&#x27;t really integrated even under a single OEM umbrella.<p>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.

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

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.<p>To me this isn&#x27;t really about a single company, it&#x27;s about shoving so much tech into your home that barely does anything it&#x27;s no wonder something always breaks. How many years of uninterrupted light switch pressing do you need to do before this actually pays off?

I agree, I went all in on nest hubs&#x2F;minis etc to have assistant for making requests to control stuff. I&#x27;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&#x27;ve had to pay for...because Google&#x27;s home ecosystem is just fucking terrible, anybody could do better with their eyes closed).<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s just a nightmare.<p>I haven&#x27;t done any personal projects in a long time but I think it&#x27;s about time I start playing with the OpenAI apis + whisper and see if I can&#x27;t build a better assistant.

Let&#x27;s be fair to a small degree: Every goddamn &quot;smarthome&quot; vendor is doing fake open, embrace and extend, partial protocol, hidden preference for its hardware, scummy foot dragging on good standards.<p>It&#x27;s just that Google adds completely rudderless leadership, its world famous utter disregard for customer support, and complete lack of commitment to the recipe.

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.<p>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?

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?

People just don&#x27;t seem to learn what google is like...

&gt; Step by step, my goal is to build out an entirely self-hosted ecosystem.<p>The only viable way.

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?<p>Why would anyone <i>ever</i> trust anything else to remain stable over the long term?

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&#x2F;youtube&#x2F;advertising dominance at all costs, and their other products only exist to confuse competitors. I&#x27;d like to run some services on Google Cloud someday, because it looks like they have a nice cloud offering, but I won&#x27;t touch it because of this.

Google don&#x27;t make smart home products, they make cloud home products.

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

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.<p>Their apps are buggy and freeze-prone, and ironically continually trying to sell more product when the existing ones don’t work well.<p>I’m regrettably having to replace everything to get off this treadmill. Lesson learned.

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.<p>I&#x27;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.

Google is the new IBM.

because its dumb to put a computer whose behavior you cannot check and which regularly receives &quot;updates&quot; in charge of something that couldn&#x27;t even be called an inconvenience before, like walking to the thermostat or flipping a lightswitch?

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.

Google has a history of killing off products that are actively used by people. The trust is broken at this point. I&#x27;m super weary of relying on Google for anything now.

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.

While touring the house we eventually bought, my wife spied a Nest on the wall and said, &quot;Oh, that&#x27;s one thing bitwize is gonna want to rip out.&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s discussed here: here-today, gone-tomorrow support with no recourse once the vendor decides to turn support off.

If this isn&#x27;t a straightforward anti-competitive lawsuit I don&#x27;t know what would be.

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

Thank you, Google, for dropping support on your OnHub products. I was able to pick up a few, cheaply, from your angry users.<p>I haven&#x27;t bought a single home device from Google and have no desire to. But Google&#x27;s utter lack of direction in this department means I now have 3 decent pieces of hardware running OpenWRT. Thanks again! ;-)

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

Google will be dead soon. They will need a to resurrect something besides an inanimate corpse.....But again. HR doesn&#x27;t care...neither does anyone who hires anyone...and most of all...neither do the execs.<p>it&#x27;s a dying horse they are trying to ride into town....

For me this feeling happened after they killed Nest Secure

I&#x27;m never lending money to Bernie Madoff again!

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.

Home Assistant. Definitely DIY, but works great

This website is full of Ads. On my M2 is lagging and can&#x27;t scroll thought.

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

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

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

I read &#x27;smart phone&#x27; instead of &#x27;smart home&#x27; and for a brief blissful moment I thought, wow, what did I miss? Is this the year of the linux phone?<p>Old enough to live perfectly well without a smart home but alas young enough so impossible to live without a smart phone.

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&#x27;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?

Investing? To me it implies stocks. You are not investing in anything, you are consuming goods and services.<p>When people buy loads of crap and call it &quot;investing in a [good] ...&quot; is that some sort of coping mechanism?<p>No, you don&#x27;t own boot futures. You bought some boots and you wear them.

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