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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

#41

Post by knolan »

Corrado wrote: post #2

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 Goog…

I love my Time Capsule. It worked flawlessly for a nearly a decade when the disk inevitably failed.

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.

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

#42

Post by marak830 »

cromka wrote: post #12

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.…

Against googles lawyers?

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.

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

#43

Post by srmarm »

c4mpute wrote: post #37
gondaloof wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can HA do that Google/Alexa can’t?

Break even faster. Upgrading HA is a chore, it frequently breaks, ceases to understand its own configuration, drops integrations.

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)

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

#44

Post by jicka »

buro9 wrote: post #19

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 pol…

I had a similar journey.

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.

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

#45

Post by asah »

buro9 wrote: post #19

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 pol…

Google Photos now stores original quality:

"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."

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

#46

Post by smt88 »

nunodonato wrote: post #3

People just don't seem to learn what google is like...

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.

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

#48

Post by lima »

buro9 wrote: post #19

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 pol…

> 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.

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

#49

Post by rcarmo »

goodpoint wrote: post #27
rcarmo wrote: post #23

I recently went and got a couple of Lenovo ThinkSmart View displays off eBay and re-purposed them: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2023/04/22/1330 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…

“now playing”?

Third link in the post: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/12/01/1920

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

#50

Post by toyg »

indeyets wrote: post #17

The author mentioned they would be moving towards local smart-home solution but doesn’t mention HomeAssistant even once https://www.home-assistant.io/

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).
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