I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
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.
I still use it in my office for backups with a new disk. I wish Apple still made them and made swapping disks tool free.
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)!
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.
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.
Fascinatingly this content is narrated by a robot voice...
The official Github is https://github.com/revanced
The Github is very obtuse about the installation steps, so this guide on reddit gives the procedure more adequately: https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/xlcny9/revance...
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.
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.
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... .
3. GKE clusters automatically log to GCP Cloud Logging, the first 50 GB of which is free. Fair enough. But the ingestion price afterwards is a truly mind-boggling $0.50/GB! (https://cloud.google.com/logging/#section-7). How do you turn off GCP Cloud Logging so that you can ship your logs to a cheaper vendor instead? Nope, there's no first-class managed setting; all you get is a community tutorial (https://cloud.google.com/community/tutorials/kubernetes-engi...) that links to this GitHub configuration (https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/community/blob/master...) aaaaand good luck :)
4. No native IPv6. See e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64110542/has-anyone-iden... . AWS of course does support IPv6: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-ipv6.ht...
And this is just off the top of my head.
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!
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.
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".
Google wants to look amateurish for as long as possible to avoid stronger regulation.
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.
Could you please enlighten us what else gets left behind?
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.
If you have a Google hosted domain on gmail like I do, it won’t work.
I’ll never buy a nest again either.
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.
Keep that shit away from my home and my car.
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...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/134131981597
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.
Thank You. And that is precisely why I increasingly hate anything that comes with software.
- install a cert so we can MITM the traffic and see what they're phoning home about
- turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality
- configure a different address for cloud I/O, such that I can run the "cloud" part on my own infra if I want those features
* Assuming no malicious lobbying.
Start with Windows, iOS (Siri), and pretty much any updateable software.
Let's change that. Anything less is a RCE vulnerability.
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.
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:
I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are
- unnecessarily complicated
- privacy destroying
- overpriced
- vendor lock-in
- often infected with online ads you can't get rid of
- likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it
IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" device.
- I want to know everything about you and who you talk to
- I will control and change things without your say-so
- You can't leave me easily
- no you can’t know what you need to know to self host when I leave. How dare you think of other vendors that’s basically cheating on me
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.
I’m using openHAB instead of HA for the tinkerability, but the new versions are pretty power user friendly
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 love that we have options like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
They're all plugged into wall power all the time, and powerline Ethernet works fine.
What am I missing?
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.
Most of the remotes switches, sensors, and some others are all battery powered and last at least a year without needing to be changed.
In fact, they would be largely useless or cumbersome if they needed a wire.
I could make all this computer controlled over a home server if I wanted to, but what's the point?
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".
(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.
[0]: https://mathmos.com/lava-lamps/lava-lamps-for-children-and-a...
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.
All these "smart" devices are anything but.
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 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.
But then there's a lot of stuff that our governments could solve but they never will.
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.
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.
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?
This is a weirdly confrontational comment.
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.
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.
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.
Apart from increasing ad revenue, there isn't a single thing that Google's leadership has been succeeding.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We eventually sold the house, otherwise frustration would continue
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
That would be pretty awesome.
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.
Also, the daily briefing is a different use-case than was described above, where the GP commenter just wanted to play music.
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.
So, controlling a speaker from your phone in the shower is an obvious solution versus trying to talk to it.
Or just pay a small amount for a dedicated speaker with handsfree voice controls...
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.
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 have Alexa, a Dot device, which works great - never any problems - with Spotify. I think it's better than Bluetooth speaker, yeah.
Because of the timers. I can ask it to set a timer for shampoo or condition, 3 minutes, or washing my teeth, 2 minutes.
But also I can request a song by name, and for many songs it works.
It basically works as well as a Bluetooth speaker, for the same cost, but with more functionality. Pretty easy choice.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the guide I used: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/google_assistant/
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.
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.
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.
It's the new industry normal. Amazon Prime Music zeroed out all user's investment of time spent crafting playlists, five months back.
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.
It would require a massive amount of pissed off consumers, and a huge team to even drag them to court.
End result would be google paying a pittance and no one getting anything.
End of the day, a lot of lawyers would be paid well and google would shrug it off as a cost of business.
For everyone else in tech, I suppose we can all vow to never purchase Google products as gifts for family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kind of how copyright (was supposed to) work, giving access to the public eventually.
If the companies making components don't like this, they should be more careful about who they sell components to.
I’m sorry but you’re asking for it when you go Google.
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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
Pixel 6, US, I keep it up to date.
* My speakers randomly don't show up as options when casting * With two speakers in my house, they often both answer at the same time or one of them waits a few seconds and says something went wrong * Bluetooth randomly stops working sometimes and requires a power cycle.
The list goes on.
And why is there a poll at the start?
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.
Their phones are fine, those are easily flashed with many other ROMs. But anything locked down like smart home stuff should be avoided.
Same with any online services that don't easily support data export to something else.
Nearly every device I've considered has had either a provided or community written driver[3] available.
1: https://hubitat.com/ 2: https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-2-3-5-available/1133... 3: https://community.hubitat.com/t/custom-device-drivers-wiki
So you can do "Siri turn all lights off" or whatever, and still be able to turn the lights on and off if the Internet is down.
Still on the fence if it's worth the cost.
Then I started thinking, what sort of switch is programmatically controllable, uses open standards has a large number of ports is vendor interchangeable. and it hit me. a POE ethernet switch.
Now I just have to find a source of 48V leds.
hashtag: only_half_joking.
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.
Is there someone still building anything that relies on a given Google service still being around and working in a year?
After multiple opaque “Sorry, not working, maybe try later messages, eventually it became clear from support forums that someone at Nest had decided that google managed domains == company email, and we aren’t going to support that because your boss might watch the feeds. Never mind if you’re using it at a company. Never mind if you’re using your domain for a family (as they used to recommend was a great use for “Google for Domains”!).
Any time they were challenges they just doubled down.
Ok bye then…
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!
Then each smart device has a unique name based upon their function. Dog names or primary user.
Echo/Computer/Alexia, turn on Fido (outdoor lights)
Pairing by voice is also helpful.
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.
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.
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.
People now: hey wire tap, can cats eat pancakes?
The amount of control and surveillance we inflicted on the children of the 90s has become the new expectation for adult citizens.
A decade ago I was all-in, Chromecast Audio, Android, GSuite for a personal domain, Photos, Maps, Home products when they emerged. I'd made a bet that software could improve faster than hardware and chose to be as free in my choice of hardware as possible (Linux on a variety of machines and to bet on web software) rather than choosing a potentially more polished but closed world (Apple or Microsoft). Google for me, offered a third way.
But all I learned is that the massive disconnect between units within Google would result in an experience that worsened itself on a continual basis.
At first I thought it was all due to the "Google for your Domain" account as it became clear that GSuite was becoming a corp only thing.
So I migrated to a Gmail account https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...
But... that didn't solve things!
I got more things working, but they then felt like they diverged with limited experiences in different areas. The recognition that a home is multi-person came very late, and it's clunky.
Google Music shuttered, and I could no longer upload the things that I had which they did not. So I moved to ripping my own CDs (this took 3 years!!!) and then a NAS + Plex (love this!).
Gmail removed all of the personal domain things and a big redirect chain from GSuite through Gmail made debugging a missing email a pain plus so many stories about email being closed and shuttering the whole account, so I moved to Fastmail (love this!).
Photos got worse (and BTW you cannot get the photos out at the same quality as you put them in unless you individually download each one!!!), so I'm now using Syncthing + NAS + Plex (it's OK for photos, not great TBH).
Drive felt like it stagnated and improvements in GSuite (my work accounts) didn't feel like they hit the personal accounts (the GMail one). I moved to Syncthing + NAS (love this!), and actually opted for a Microsoft account for Office 365 (but I don't use OneDrive).
Home automation was severely dented with the Sonos battle, so now all of that is Home Assistant for me (it's pretty good — still more for the advanced tinkerer than the average person in UX though).
As the Sonos battle produced it's outcome I realised that actually running different things like bluetooth or PlexAmp headless works better for remote control... and honestly, Google weren't providing a great audio experience (Cast doesn't play media at it's highest quality levels and you can't get a raw digital out signal from Google's own products except a TOSlink on Chromecast Audio which is now unsupported and locked the rate to 44Khz and required upsampling in the subsequent DAC).
By Google's constant fumbling here I am a decade later with very few Google products in my life. I'm down to maps (which I keep because of stars) but am increasingly using OsmAnd+, Android (but I'm open to considering an iPhone next time as case availability is an issue with Pixel devices after 1-2 years and my phones last longer than that), and my Nest doorbell (don't get me started on how bad the Nest integration has been!).
I'm not rejecting Google as much as they seem to be rejecting their users. I'm just listening to what they seem to be telling me... which is that they really do not want end consumers as customers, and that's fine because many companies do and things like Fastmail, Plex, Syncthing, Signal, etc are all phenomenal and I pay or donate to all.
This isn't death by a thousand paper cuts, it's death by a million paper cuts. Other products may be a little worse, but as they aren't causing paper cuts constantly they feel joyful to use by comparison.
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.
"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."
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.
Clearly not their focus. I still use it for audiobooks and live tv, but I migrated photos to photoprism which is great.
Also check out photo structure. The author posts here sometimes. Both are great apps.
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)
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.
Things seem to break more if you pull in external software repositories (HACS) but that's to be expected.
I've integrated monitoring my heatpump, solar palens, speakers, Ikea and Philips lights, Todoist, calendars, Garmin and much more. All controllable via Python scripting.
"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?
> “Google’s directionless approach”
This phrase has applied to all parts of google since the departure of Schmidt.
I used to think it was a shame, but eventually realized we’ve been lucky.
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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.
My question is... where is the nicely packaged, off the shelf, easy to use but open to expansion voice assistant that works with it?
/s?
I don't even know how this is possible, but Siri is worse, so I'm stuck with Google.
The only viable way.
Why would anyone ever trust anything else to remain stable over the long term?
Their apps are buggy and freeze-prone, and ironically continually trying to sell more product when the existing ones don’t work well.
I’m regrettably having to replace everything to get off this treadmill. Lesson learned.
I'm 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.
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.
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.
[0]: https://www.netatmo.com/en-gb/additional-smart-radiator-valv...
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
You have conaumer rights over the reasonable lifetime of a product for something to keep working.
The reasonable lifetime of a home surveillance system, as he says in the article, is 10+ years.
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 feels like I only hear this on tech forums. Everyone outside trusts Google and that’s kind of the issue
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 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! ;-)
it's a dying horse they are trying to ride into town....
(I block JS by default, but have to allow it for so many things).
Old enough to live perfectly well without a smart home but alas young enough so impossible to live without a smart phone.
When people buy loads of crap and call it "investing in a [good] ..." is that some sort of coping mechanism?
No, you don't own boot futures. You bought some boots and you wear them.
But I completely agree with your fundamental point - it would be better described as a sunk-cost.
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.
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.
- 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.