Nest, the company, died at Google I/O 2019

It's possible that there will never be any stability in the smart home ecosystem, and constantly buying and throwing away electronic junk is simply the norm.

Moving to Google Accounts is more murky: I can definitely see and sympathize with arguments on the basis of Google's overall business model and how it seems off for an ad company to be creating products for the home. With that said, Nest accounts (like the app) are woeful and only support the weakest of 2FA methods. (And in fact, I had that break for me on their desktop site -- enter the 2FA, then infinite loading.)

And the definite downside everyone seems to agree on is that killing Works with Nest (especially on a, IMO, short timeframe) shatters the trust placed in that ecosystem. Clickbait comments are focusing on the short-term which is going to be messy and involve a lot of people ditching Nest, but (whether I agree with it or not) I don't see APIs which give direct device access like Works with Nest even being a thing in the future.

In a world where the WSJ is sounding the alarm at people adding benign add-ons to Gmail by their own hand, not to mention people blaming Nest for their own weak passwords, it may be that even basic security principles need to be re-examined and in a way "dumbed down." An example of this dumbing down is removing the ability to turn the recording light off moving forward.[1]

"Dumbing down" is a negative term, but I'm trying to apply it as neutrally as possible. It makes sense to Google to remove that ability, since any blowback would fall on them. I'm honestly surprised we haven't yet seen the headline "Google's Nest Cam recorded me even though it looked turned off," when the real story there would be an ex-SO or roommate opted to turn the light off and start recording.

1. https://www.techradar.com/news/exclusive-googles-security-ca...

My relatively poor grandparents and my slightly less poor parents had a hard working life, but none of them had to sleep in a dark cold room because the switch to turn the lights on or the heating stopped working. Ever. This problem has been solved by other people many many years ago.

Last month I watched a documentary where a billionaire was showing of his multi million mansion and when he wanted to show the camera team his 100k home cinema room they couldn't see anything because his smart lighting system was stuck in an update loop and nobody had a clue how to fix it. In the interview he said it's not a big deal because he doesn't like to have the lights on when watching a movie anyway. L.O.L.

If I had a 100k cinema room then it would be certainly be a big deal to me if I can't even see where the heck I'm walking.

In my entire life I never thought "damn, how nice would it be if I could turn on the lights in my bedroom from downstairs on my phone". It's just not a problem which I think people have, but somehow the consumer industry has convinced so many fools to buy cheaply fabricated, badly secured, even worse programmed and often not long supported smart home devices which add absolutely no benefit to anyone's everyday life and cause lots of problems.

By the time I find my phone lying around in my lounge, unlock it through Face ID or finger touch, open up the home app, find the home device which I want to control, then make whatever change I wanted to do I am much faster to just get my arse up from the couch, walk over and turn it on/off with a normal hand movement. On the way I can also grab a beer from the fridge and then continue watching the telly and laugh about some fools who spent 100k on a home cinema without lights.