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.
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.
I used to feel this way, but don't anymore. Smart devices don't all go out to the cloud; you can easily build a completely-local smart home that nobody on the Internet can control or monitor. This is the default in Apple's ecosystem (though they integrate with cloud services if you want), and you don't even have to use a major tech company's ecosystem. You can install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and build your own local-only accessories with ESPHome and similar.
I find a mix of DIY and premade devices to be pretty good. I have all of my lights on Lutron Caseta (completely local, works when Internet is down) and can control them from my workstation, the wall, physical remotes, Apple devices, and Siri. I have Home Assistant bridged to Home Assistant, so can do things like control my workstation's LEDs from the Home app or Siri. Home Assistant has kind of interesting integrations, like something that reads the humidity sensor in my bathroom and the outdoor humidity to suggest how long the window needs to be opened to properly ventilate it after a shower.
I think the smart home is pretty OK. It gives you a single pane of glass to control all controllable devices, which ends up being quite worthwhile. (On a video call and need more light? Just switch them on from your computer. Too cold? Turn down the AC. No corporate tracking, just convenience.)
The worst thing that came from "the internet of things" is that people now assume that having great home automation equates to having to use cloud-connected devices that aren't really under your control. It just isn't so.
It would all be helped if the gov were to include a law forcing all IoT companies to support at least a minimum standard protocol so everything plugs together and make it possible for these things to work without downloading their app/signing up to an account. Also making it illegal for devices to phone home via the internet by default.
But then there's a lot of stuff that our governments could solve but they never will.
I tried a few of Amazon's Echo devices. I didn't spend much on them except for the big speaker. It used to be ok, but now it asks me to sign up for Unlimited music every single voice prompt. This exactly ended my desire to get anything else made by Amazon.
I used to have an Ecobee thermostat. A good idea, but it wouldn't work at all without a connection to their server. Their server uptime was a complete joke which made my thermostat useless.
I also had a few smart plugs for lamps.
I spent way too much time fiddling with all this garbage, so I trashed it all.
I fully respect when anyone decides they don't want smart devices, but all of your bullet points are quite easy to accomplish with off the shelf devices these days ("unnecessarily complicated" will always be debatable though).
All of my lights, outlets, and dozens of other niche things, never connect to the internet, and everything is fully functional when there's no internet connection.
Home Assistant with Zigbee devices is fantastic for avoiding vendor lock-in[0]. EspHome and Tasmota fill in nicely for if/when you want wifi devices.
Convenience. Some people don't desire it, and that's fine.
My wife said the same thing as you at first, and originally had no desire for any of it.
Instead of buying dimmer switches to replace the on/off wall switches, I got dimmers that go in the gang box behind the existing switches. I did this for her, because she preferred a real switch and now we can on/off with a real switch (as it worked originally) or control brightness/on/off with voice, app, or zigbee remotes.
Since I did this on all our wall switches, my wife went from using the real switches 100% of the time to now around 0-5% of the time. When we're away from home she always makes a comment on how annoying it is to NOT have it.
Asking for a brightness change while watching a movie or cooking with dirty hands, automatically tuning the lights to something warmer at night and brighter during the day, forgot to turn something off and you're already in bed, automatically turn on the lights inside the front door when we open it with an arm full of stuff, having energy monitoring, virtual 3-way switches without any re-wiring, adding additional lights to switches that don't have real switches, controlling the TV without a remote, the list goes on.
If the reliability of it all wasn't 99%+, I wouldn't want it. I keep it because everything "just works".
Personally think zwave to be the most entrenched (commercial real estate relies heavily on zwave). The “cool” smart products typically exist as Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and zigbee devices (in that order). The requirements for those turn me off but I have been very successful with zwave. It powers everything from locks and lights to doors gates and my sprinkler system. HVAC is controlled by zwave and I even have a keychain scene controller that acts as a key fob to my house. When it comes close, it associates and that event can trigger a rule set.
I’m using openHAB instead of HA for the tinkerability, but the new versions are pretty power user friendly
Personally, I've found Zigbee devices to be much easier to find, much more reliable than Bluetooth, and the entire sector seems to be heading towards Matter, Thread, and Zigbee anyways.
My battery powered Zigbee devices last at least a year without needing a recharge/replacement, which was a huge selling point (door/vibration sensors, temperature, etc), although zwave is similar if I understand correctly. Most of mine are on year 3 now and probably need new batteries soon.
My order of preference would be Matter, Zigbee, Wifi, and Bluetooth being a last resort option. Z-wave isn't on the list only because I decided against getting a controller for it.
I got a Hubitat box that has both Zwave and Zigbee. I've only ever used Zwave devices and they all work very well but I guess I have the option of Zigbee if I need it. I've avoided anything Wifi or Bluetooth. I don't really know what "Matter" is but I had thought it was a Google thing, which I would certainly avoid at all costs. Maybe I misunderstood it though.
That’s the thing you need four different methods to access the protocols you describe. Of those protocols you listed, zwave operates at the lowest frequency giving you the best coverage. And has all the same benefits of zigbee (auto healing, mesh network). So yeah there are options but some of them just make no sense (as you pointed out)
You can look at several types in that list that don't have wall power easily or always available. Door and window sensors, which could be solved similar to older alarm systems, but have a significantly lower barrier to entry being wireless. There are convenience and accessibility benefits to allowing wireless battery-powered switches to control your devices. Wi-Fi can be an answer for a lot of these but there are battery life and coverage benefits to the mesh behavior of these networks without needing to spend a lot to expand your Wi-Fi coverage.
Why would I plug sensors, that sip power, into a power point?
When I have humidity/temperature, light, motion, etc in every single room how many freaking power points am I meant to have in my house, aha. Maybe American houses have walls absolutely studded with power points but most other places don't.
Adding to this, I just don't see the use case for "smart" devices. The difference between me getting up and checking the thermometer vs checking the thermometer using my phone is 10 seconds, max.
We have a heat pump, so we change the temperature roughly twice a year: heating temperature in winter, air conditioning temperature in summer.
But my Ecobee reports the temperature in three rooms (and occupancy, which I tie into automating lights), outside temperature, outside and inside humidity, fan/heat/cool start/stop times, and some other more obscure metrics up to the mothership, and the excellent third-party website Beestat[1] tracks all of those using Ecobee's well-documented API. It lets me spot anomalies, and helps me understand if I've got the resistive heating configured to come on at the best time.
If we had time-of-day rates for electricity, it would optimize for those, but we don't have time-of-day-rates.
(If I had gas heat, or if I didn't work from home, I'd at least schedule temperature changes to set things cooler at night or when we're away -- maybe driven by the occupancy sensors! -- but apparently that's not effective with heat pumps.
I dipped my toe ever so cautiously into "smart home" territory last year, buying three "smart" lightbulbs at the Apple Store, but only talking to them over Bluetooth.
(At least, I think I'm only doing that: I suppose it's possible the software that talks to them via BT got them on my WiFi without my permission? Doubtful but hmmm...)
Anyway at some point there was a software update to the controller app and it couldn't find them. After much back and forth, I uninstalled that app, and the iPhone's iHome or whatever app then recognized two of them, but not the third. That one started freaking out and randomly turning itself on and off.
Now it's mostly off, but comes on for a bit about once a week. Yes, I'm lazy about changing lightbulbs.
All this drama for... freakin' lightbulbs that can change color. Doesn't make me want to further smartify my home.
I figure some simple fake LED candles are my future mood lighting. I'd spring for a Mathmos Lava Lamp[0] if they didn't look like sex toys.
I hope you're not serious about the sex toy thing lmao, I thought we were all over that sort of prudishness by now or is it a I don't eat hot dogs cause I'm a man sort of thing
- likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it
This is true of anything these days...hell even as someone who's into electronics/firmware development stuff and whatnot, I wouldn't even bother trying to fix a $20-50 (or even more) device, let alone the average person. Stuff is complicated enough these days that you pretty much have to become the expert on any device in order to fix it.
The Xiaomi zigbee stuff is pretty good/standard, amongst others. IoT can be great, I find the most useful thing is using cheap Xiaomi motion sensors with wifi led lights so that lights turn on/off based on presence in the room.
meh they don't have to be privacy destroying. Home automation forums on reddit have some pretty good lists of what to get and ones that are interoperable. I looked into it but I guess I'm just happy with switches and dumb thermostats.
Or it could be done like GDPR — requiring consent and explaining what addresses the device will communicate to, what data will be sent, when, and for what purpose. GDPR requires that every purpose of personal data use is consented to and explained the same way — what data is collected, where it is processed, for how long it is retained, and for what purpose. New tech privacy laws could* definitely use something like this as a starting point.
It's in that direction, but I think existing right to repair legislation stops short of the right to exclude dependency on the manufacturer's infrastructure entirely.
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.
That's what the parent is saying. The new digital thermostats have some nice features without the stupidity that is IoT connectivity that allows the parent corporation to screw you over when they get bored.
I personally would not consider anything IoT because anything connected to the internet is a) a vector for intrusion into my network and b) has a lifetime measured in single digit years. Anything going into a home should realistically have a lifetime of at minimum ten years. For capital improvements like a furnace or thermometer connected to it (or a washing machine, or a stove), it should be measured in decades. Even lightbulbs aren't that disposable anymore thanks to LEDs.
Google discards things after a handful of years. Anything cellphone related has a lifetime of 5 years max, and for most it's more like 2 to 3.
> Even lightbulbs aren't that disposable anymore thanks to LEDs.
I'm staring at a pair of wifi enabled lightbulbs above the island in my kitchen that are stuck on the same hue I set them to three years ago when the app actually worked...
Even that isn't a binary decision (haha). I have a 60 year old dumb analog thermostat and it solves that problem by having a big knob on it with time to set Heating and Cooling. No winding required.
Adjusted for inflation this would cost almost $500. Probably explains why the ones in my bungalow starter home were just bimetallic coils with mercury switches.
> 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.
I call it, "collective post nut clarity". The tech looks nice at CES but the users are waking up to the fact they now need to swap their mirror, thermostat, door locks, etc. every few years. Smart LED bulbs are ironic in that LED bulbs were supposed to be so efficient they would save the planet and now people regularly throw them in the garbage for "smart" features. Everything is a con.
After maintaining online services, I’m quite sure it’s vulnerabilities. It’s extremely costly after 3-5 years to maintain old software.
Ex: You have a thermostat or an alarm system that runs Debian, Debian gets a vulnerability, you try to upgrade it, but you need to change Debian versions, and your old stack isn’t supported on the newer version. Nowadays you need to keep patching all your old appliances, keep the old domain names and exact URLs, and need to actively look for vulnerabilities. All of that can only be provided by a subscription, not the initial purchase cost:
Perhaps it's too radical, but if this is the main concern, you could still build appliances with Linux that just aren't networked. Take a page out of Battlestar Galactica's playbook.
My smart home stuff is all Z-Wave and my oldest devices are going on 10 years now. A light switch doesn’t need to be maintained or updated. I guess a hacker could drive up to my house with a laptop and a SDR, reverse engineer the protocol and then, I guess, turn my lights on and off? That’s a security tradeoff I’m willing to accept.
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.
Internet-connected software is unavoidably fragile. Remote APIs change and malicious threats evolve. If a company doesn't want to provide long-term maintenance to head off those problems, then they shouldn't be baking in internet-connected software in simple consumer products.
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.
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.
Physical dumb devices that are 100+ years old are usually made out of pretty durable, but individually replaceable parts. Thus they get fixed if they do break. The mechanisms are usually pretty easy to figure out, so you can spot if a spring is broken, a bolt is loose, a thing stopped turning, etc.
Reliability of anything can be described by the same generic bathtub curve — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve. We used to have a lot of technology that would wear out very slowly, but early failure was more common. Now most technology doesn't last more than a year or two, but generally doesn't fail upfront.
Can you rephrase this? I don't understand the point you're making. Two verbs against the same subject but with different temporal context, perhaps you stuggle with communicating sometimes?
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.
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.
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.
Looking into Android Code Search, I've found the same issues. Google keeps saying C++ is a terrible language, but the way they use it is pretty bad too. "A bad workman blames his tools" springs to mind a lot reading that code.
GKE at least used to be a bit better, but that’s only worth so much compared to the rest of the services where you’ll frequently find feature gaps where you end up adding a +1 to an issue which has been open for years, and building your own service (yay, more toil). There’s some room for debate on security depending on exactly what features you use and what your needs are but if you use GCP, I’ll just note that Google gave all of your compute instances privileged access to your entire project and you should fix that that immediately if you haven’t already done so.
I’d also note that it used to be fairly comparable on pricing but they’ve been raising prices on some things which I noticed meant a cost savings migrating away.
> you’ll frequently find feature gaps where you end up adding a +1 to an issue which has been open for years, and building your own service (yay, more toil)
Yup, exactly my experience and what I meant by amateurish. We aren't even talking about "crazy" features.
For example, their identity management service supports MFA only though a cell text. Adding support for Google auth was a years old issue that we were told "yeah, lots of other people want this and if you plus 1 it maybe PM will prioritize it".
It's probably the best managed Kubernetes out there. People just like to make hyperboles. The consumer stuff, especially the free ones, get abandoned every now and then, but the "enterprise" services are pretty good.
GKE is an abomination. Its reputation is completely undeserved. Sure there's some nice things out of the box, like authenticating to clusters with your Google/GCP account, but day 2 operations are a constant frustration.
What sucks?
1. The Kubernetes Pod garbage collector is configured to be abominally slow, keeping terminated pods in the API server for far too long. This interferes with cluster monitoring by making it seem like there's a consistently high number of OOMKilled etc. pods rather than blipping as it happens. GCP support claims this is working as intended and recommends manually running a script to clean up the API server if it bothers you (this is a managed service?!). See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75374590/why-kubernetes-... .
2. The rest of the Kubernetes world moved on from kube-dns and on to CoreDNS. Not GKE! On GKE your two options are kube-dns and the GCP VPC-native Cloud DNS (i.e. Kubernetes service and pod records are listed in the private DNS zone for the VPC). Surprise surprise - if you pick Cloud DNS to help scale your cluster, because GCP isn't operating kube-dns well enough on its managed control plan, then you're on the hook for paying for the Cloud DNS zone as well, it's not included in the GKE cluster costs. See e.g. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/cloud... .
A lot of this criticism could also be levelled at Azure’s AKS service.
IPv6 is broken there as well, and they similarly overcharge for logging. However, instead of 50c per GB, they charge $2.75 per GB, which is highway robbery. That’s more than 5x what GCP or AWS charge.
I swear Microsoft must have been aiming for “half price to be competitive” and then accidentally put the decimal point in the wrong place.
Let this sink in: they charge the price of a serviceable used car or a decent gaming PC to store 1 TB of text for a month!
GCP is clearly good if your use cases match their services. However, there are a lot of things that are sub-optimal.
IPv6 doesn't have non-premium networking. Premium networking is nice, but non-premium networking is less expensive.
Instances sometimes take more than 5 minutes to shutdown. A lot of things seem very slow like this. Really frustrating to use for testing when it takes so long to bring an environment up and to clean it afterwards.
Load balancing is hard to use outside of http style short connection use cases. There's no load feedback mechanism, and at small request rates, requests are severely unbalanced anyway. Managed instance groups can auto scale downwards, but connection drain is implemented as take it out of rotation and wait a configurable time and destroy the instance. If the instance drains faster, it won't be destroyed faster. If you want to drain for more than 60 minutes, that's too bad (this isn't that unreasonable, but while I'm ranting...)
Google's container optimized OS has documentation that tells you how to configure docker log retention... But then their container runner (konlet) forces their own log settings for the main container, so your settings are ignored.
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.
It's crazy, when I remove the YouTube Shorts pane it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days".
It feels like a slap to the face by some promotion seeking Google Manager who tells me that he knows better than me. It's crazy. I didn't stop using YouTube like you did but I was darn close. I guess they do know better than me, in a way.
It’s the same in Instagram: removing recommended posts only has an option to remove for 30 days. The consistent enshittification of products with these sorts of behaviours just makes me want to use them less. Unfortunately I’m sure they’ve got data that shows that my reaction is a minority.
On Android you can install https://newpipe.net and turn off a lot of things: no more trending/start screen recommendations if you don't want them, you can turn off comments, or "watch next" recommendations.. the shorts show up in the search results like other normal videos, with a slider so you can still navigate it.
They also are very slowly "injecting" shorts everywhere. I'm randomly browsing the feed, not shorts, click on something and before I know it, I'm watching shorts. And yeah, they also recently added a shorts "pane" on the side of normal videos.
I'm annoyed by the inability to hide shorts but I don't really find them addictive. I've watched a few, determined they were as useless as they appeared, and just ignore them. But it's annoying the amount of space they take up, it's a good third of the screen on my phone.
I'm pretty sure revanced.net is not affiliated with the actual project and shouldn't be trusted. AFAIK there's no prebuilt APK doing everything for you that can be trusted, it's a multi-step process one has to follow front the official source.
> 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.
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.
They are a search company, yet they decided to give the same name to two completely different web frameworks. Ok one is called AngularJS and the other one is Angular, but still.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
In the described use-case, you don't have to re-pair your phone, you just turn the speaker on and it reconnects automatically. Both phone OSs work that way, reconnecting automatically to known devices.
Also, the daily briefing is a different use-case than was described above, where the GP commenter just wanted to play music.
That works in a single person household. But once an extra person wants to use it then each person has to do the dance of re-pairing every morning - which can be painful if the other person's device was the last one that connected and is nearby.
Being able to have anyone just walk in the shower and say "device play music on Spotify" and have it just work is much simpler and requires much less thinking and effort - which is really nice first thing in the morning.
Also a speaker you can't connect after getting in the shower, but a smart speaker you can.
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.
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.)
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.
While nearly all phones (including iPhones) have been waterproof for almost decade now that does not solve the issue with capacitive touch screens not working when wet, where to put the phone where it won't slip and break on the tiles, and the terrible quality of phone speakers in general. And then you have a wet slippery phone to put in your pocket (plus probably water trapped behind whatever case you have on it).
Or just pay a small amount for a dedicated speaker with handsfree voice controls...
When you shower, do you just put your clothes on and have no access to a towel?
The first iPhone that claimed to be water resistant was the iPhone 7, which was the first iPhone to remove the headphone jack. Android phones solved water resistance with a headphone jack years before that. It was released in 2016, 3 years after the wave of Android phones that were water resistant. I'm a little surprised that it was that long ago but it also makes me question how water resistant the phones are.
Your contrived use cases in the shower come across as someone who hasn't tried to use their phone in the shower. Cases easily come off, towels exist, shower caddies exist, places where your soap isn't under a constant stream of water exist, and screens work pretty well in the shower if you aren't trying to use it under a direct stream of water in your face.
I've personally never seen the feature touted in Apple advertising, so it seems fragile to me. Although I guess the number of stories I hear of people using the bathroom and needing to replace their phone because it fell in the toilet has decreased. My iPhone using friends are usually surprised when I say I regularly use my Sony in the shower.
If the iPhone actually is capable of handling water finally, maybe the screen is just particularly bad with water on it.
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.
Yeah it really rubs me wrong that smart devices do this. I OWN it. This isn’t a person. It’s a fucking computer and I don’t need lectures on language I use in my own home on my own devices. I’ll speak to my property however I want
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Does the HA voice assistant support require HA Cloud or whatever they're calling it? The price for that $6/m felt a bit steep for what it provided, though supporting HA development is appealing.
When I started to read through the non-cloud option, I saw some analog telephone and POTS modem requirements and my eyes glazed over.
> Does the HA voice assistant support require HA Cloud or whatever they're calling it?
I've set it up with a Google API key. The process of getting an API key isn't very smooth (Google's backend is terrible and guides from just a week ago may already be outdated if you're unlucky) but after pasting three magical strings it works very well. It supports most sensors and devices I've tried it with.
I've only had it fail because some Google can't do natural language parsing for some of the software sensors I've set up on HA ("how many days until my website's certificate expires") but for your standard smart lights/blinds/presence detection/etc. it'll work just fine.
Everything but step 4.9.2 and step 5 are messing around in Google dashboard but they seem to have updated the dashboard these days. All of this messing around with APIs is probably why they recommend people to just use their cloud offering.
> When I started to read through the non-cloud option, I saw some analog telephone and POTS modem requirements and my eyes glazed over.
Confused on that one.
You can expose Home Assistant to the internet (preferably using a reverse proxy like Traefik or Nginx, which is basically what your $6 gets you anyway) to make Google Assistant work properly with it.
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.
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"
Or
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
They cleared the exams, with barely passing scores though. In law, you can't paraphrase much - nuances in the law is everything when you're against the best lawyers that these tech giants would hire.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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).
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.
Preface: I’m an iPhone user, but I’m kinda confused what you’re trying to achieve that can’t be had with just pressing the physical button the phone to turn off the screen. Does the screen need to be on for the alarm to work?
To clarify: the issue is that the screen stays illuminated when charging on the stand.
Pressing the physical button used to work, even with the current oddball settings. It only stopped being effective a few weeks ago, when using a wireless charging stand.
It still works when I switch back to USB charging. Presumably because it would be too easy to simply place the phone face down, effectively revealing user preference.
I wonder if you're looking for the Settings -> Display -> Screen Saver function. Have you tried disabling it?
When enabled, it seems to have two options to either enable "when charging" or "when docked and charging". I wonder if your wireless charger is considered a dock and hence activates this different mode than you get for regular USB charging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
I had this experience a few years back and just put it in the sorta janky but hacky fun box.
However I did a totally fresh reinstall on some new hardware 6 months ago and it's been absolutely rock solid since and updates have been one click without issue.
Was still a bit of a faff to set up (though tbf that was more around the VM side of things which was my perogative)
I had the exact same experience. I might even have some comments on an old HN account complaining about HA's disregard for upgrade stability. After another broken upgrade, I finally decided to just fix my install at a certain update in March 2022 and leave it there. I left it there for over a year, until I wanted a few newer features. I carved out a chunk of my weekend to make sure I had time to fix whatever broke with everything and... nothing broke after catching up on a full year of updates. It's now faster, just as reliable, and has more features than before.
Home Assistant is finally ready for primetime in the average technical user's home.
I upgrade it automatically for years and they royally fucked the upgrade only once (I had to spend an hour to bring it back to life). Otherwise I never had an issue with my set of devices.
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.
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
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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'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, "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.
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.
It's going to take a while before the general public realizes this.
You need to see multiple failures before you can move the needle on a giant. This is especially true of a popular brand which is seen on android phones everywhere and it's essentially intangible (one example: you buy an asus phone, you still see "with google", but you don't associate poor sw with google: people still blame asus).
It's also much slower for physical products.
If you don't buy new cars but go for the 10y low-mileage ones, you'll be about to start experiencing extremely shitty car infotainment systems where every system cloud feature is useless because the api endpoint is already broken.
For houses and appliances it's even longer.
The problem is those past products and broken cloud features will haunt companies even if they corrected themselves for newer ones. You can't get rid of those as fast as you drop cloud services and make people forget. Google (and others) will learn this the hard way, in the long term.
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.)
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.
That all makes perfect sense and it's how we had always assumed these things worked. However we were told - by multiple installers - that they couldn't guarantee the products they were offering would continue to work for long without Internet access. Even if they didn't literally shut down with loss of power supply they wouldn't necessarily be configurable. That really matters with battery-backed systems where there are different strategies for charging them that might make sense depending on the conditions and expected usage.
It seems a particularly bad design because if the power is out in our area then probably so is the Internet. (Apparently our local ISPs haven't discovered putting a UPS in with their last-mile equipment yet.) And yet these were battery-backed systems that could take over supply for our own property during an outage so having access to their UI to change settings in the event of a longer outage could be important.
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.
I don’t disagree with you on shitty UI, but I’m going to question “a treasure trove for thieves”. I just don’t believe there’s some sort of house thieve’s Union running attacks on boiler infrastructure in order to work out who’s on holiday this week, especially given the low penetration on those things meaning you’re going to get visibility into one in a hundred homes. It just seems so low value compared to driving round the block for a few days and seeing who’s car hasn’t moved.
Driving around costs gas and time every time you go do it.
Compromising the centralized server is a one-time cost; once you've snuck something in there to regularly send updates where you can see them, you get alerts on those 1/100 houses that are rich and dumb enough to pay for this overpriced "smart" boiler. Maybe you can even work out a way to let people all over the world subscribe to these updates for a fee and let them take the risk of actually breaking in and fencing stuff.
Heck, you could even hack your way into a bunch of other smart home servers, and bundle all of that up into a nice little darknet service offering regular updates of stuff like "everyone in a 20mi radius of a given point who is setting all their smart stuff to vacation mode". That sounds like it might be a pretty nice passive income stream if you don't care about the very obvious legal/ethical issues involved.
And maybe your nice little darknet service could also let people say "hey, do you know anything about jon-wood?" and reply with "why yes we do, here's a few hints, would you like to pay for more?".
The risk/reward calculations on this might only work out if you're a regular employee of a highly-organized crime ring instead of the mysterious hacker running a darknet site that serves as one of many hubs of a decentralized crime syndicate, I dunno. The hacker sure makes for a cooler story if you're writing a techno-thriller or a cyberpunk novel though. :)
This is an important principle. If essential systems in everyone's homes start depending on remote connections to work and/or including spyware that phones home with any kind of data about how the system is being used then that's a serious security and privacy concern. It's bad enough that we have metered supplies of various utilities and instead of the old "agent pops round to read the meter every few months" we now have smart meters phoning home with metrics every few minutes. At least the metering is there for a legitimate reason and the change to smart meters does have some real advantages including for the homeowner so the risk is more an unintended but unavoidable side effect in those cases. Almost everything else that goes under the "smart home" banner seems to be like smart TVs and connected vehicles: if it's phoning home then it's a good bet it's doing it for their benefit and not yours.
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.
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.
You are probably in the US. In Germany usually each radiator has a thermostat and you usually do not have wall thermostats unless you have floor heating.
That being said, I’ve double checked and it is Netatmo [0] and not Nest. The point still stands, that some cloud based home automation devices behave stupid if they cannot talk to the server.
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.
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! ;-)
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....
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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”).
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.
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.