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

androidauthority.com

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

#2

Post by Corrado »

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.

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

#4

Post by bitwize »

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.

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

#7

Post by leipert »

bitwize wrote: post #4

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 le…

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.

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

#9

Post by Silhouette »

bitwize wrote: post #4

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 le…

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.)

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

#10

Post by bruce343434 »

Investing? To me it implies stocks. You are not investing in anything, you are consuming goods and services.

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.

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