Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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Who knows, but there's this vision of home automation that google has bought into and thinks it can sell. The logical place for your home automation 'master' is your thermostat. Everyone has one and having a nice one is well... nice and centralizing it as a sensor hub makes a lot of sense. Google saw Nest and knew it had a lot of potential, so they snapped it up. Now they're trying to sell us on this idea.

Personally, I'm just not seeing it. The idea of a centralized or master system is old fashioned. People will just buy automation as they need it. So I'll have an app on my phone for my Ring doorbell, another for my garage door, another for my security system, another for my lighting, etc. Google is betting that people won't want this and want an Apple-like experience of just having one vendor perform all their tasks, but people without SV salaries aren't going to casually drop Nest-like prices (total cost of the system with multiple smoke detectors is in the four digits) all at once and they might resent a high level of vendor lock-in. They'll just pick up random automation pieces at home depot for $99 each now and again and just install a new app as needed. Its not a terrible inconvenience and so what if my doorbell can't talk to my thermostat.

In this case, though, as I understand it (I live in NYC and am thus not the target market for these types of products besides maybe lightbulbs), Apple's solution, HomeKit, does allow interaction between disparate products, and it's even the banner feature!

https://www.apple.com/ios/homekit/

But your 'central controller' is your phone's proprietary software. And a wireless central hub isn't always ideal because that central hub (your phone) sometimes leaves the house.

The one-off methodology is a poor one. It's popular recently because of how cheap and easy it is to retail such a product. But it's very limiting in what you can do, and those devices are likely to be prone to security issues.

Central management is key. Though I suspect most people would be better off using a central device many of them already have at home (a PC) than buying a custom piece of hardware to be the center of their home network.

Basing everything around your phone isn't a good solution, because it leads to having a half dozen accounts with a half dozen apps that you need to set up on a half dozen devices if you have a family...

But this is all a debate independent of Google's troubles. Between Android@Home and OnHub and Nest, Google's been trying to nail down IoT since before IoT was an expression people used. No sign they're going to get the hang of it any time soon.

Another logical place is your WiFi router. Google's OnHub is an interesting development. Will its team eventually be subsumed by Nest?

For only as long as it takes for them to transfer to other Google teams - at least based on Nest and Verily (ex GLS) precedent.

FWIW I think that Amazon, with the echo, has demonstrated a much more plausible automation hub than Google/Nest has.

I mostly agree with your overall point though. I'm just not sure what an automated home would really do that I should care about.

> so what if my doorbell can't talk to my thermostat.

Your doorbell and thermostat have little to do with each other, but having your camera or your smoke detector as mention sensors for your thermostat is pretty useful. The smoke detectors especially, since they tend to be in the bedrooms, which is the place where you'll stay 8 hours a day without walking in front of your thermostat so that it knows you are home.

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