Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 356 posts

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

#321

Post by acheron »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #304
acheron wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a Hubitat box that has both Zwave and Zigbee. I've only ever used Zwave devices and they all work very well but I guess I have the option of Zigbee if I need it. I've avoided anything Wifi or Bluetooth. I don't really know what "Matter" is but I had thought it was a Google thing, which I would certainly avoid at all costs. Maybe I misunderstood it though.

Matter was founded by Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee alliance. Apache-2 licensed. HA seems to embracing Matter/Thread pretty heavily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol) https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip https://www.home-assistant.io/skyconnect/

Interesting, guess we'll see what comes from that. Thanks.

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

#322

Post by vxNsr »

rch wrote: post #200
vxNsr wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preface: I’m an iPhone user, but I’m kinda confused what you’re trying to achieve that can’t be had with just pressing the physical button the phone to turn off the screen. Does the screen need to be on for the alarm to work?

To clarify: the issue is that the screen stays illuminated when charging on the stand. 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 preferen…

Wow that’s obnoxious.

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

#323

Post by JohnFen »

jrockway wrote: post #287
cabalamat wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new one is digital but isn't "smart". 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" devic…

I used to feel this way, but don't anymore. Smart devices don't all go out to the cloud; you can easily build a completely-local smart home that nobody on the Internet can control or monitor. This is the default in Apple's ecosystem (though they integrate with cloud services if you want), and you don't even have to use a major tech company's ecosystem. You can install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi and build your o…

Exactly.

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.

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

#324

Post by midoridensha »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #254
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 had the same router they stopped supporting, it worked great but I ended up buying their newer nest wifi because I also wanted a mesh point. They work great as well. I am waiting for the day they also stop supporting them. What's the alternative? What company makes good routers that would get updates over many years? My guess is that I should be looking at ones where I can flash a open source firmware (OpenWRT?)

>What company makes good routers that would get updates over many years? My guess is that I should be looking at ones where I can flash a open source firmware (OpenWRT?)

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.

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

#325

Post by eimrine »

DocTomoe wrote: post #170
eimrine wrote: post #82

> I believe in a future where homes are connected, smarter, and automated enough not to require switches (...) 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 p…

> 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. 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 plea…

This is a battle of aesthetically-looking stuff but not yours vs long-living stuff but having wires and boards everywhere. Former has some aestetics on surfare level but malware on deep levels. Latter looks like crap but has some aestetics on deep level. Everybody has his deepness of sensivity to aestetics.

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

#326

Post by midoridensha »

surajrmal wrote: post #223
tacocataco wrote: post #146

I feel like if a product is abandoned it should become freeware for all to use so the electronic devices involved have a less of a chance to become ewaste. Kind of how copyright (was supposed to) work, giving access to the public eventually.

Unfortunately it's often not entirely up to the company to decide. They likely use components and software written by various other companies which require strict controls over who may have access to it. The nature of those contracts would have to change first.

It should be easy to pass a law that makes all these contracts null and void. The end-users' rights should be supreme.

If the companies making components don't like this, they should be more careful about who they sell components to.

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

#327

Post by paulmooreparks »

riskable wrote: post #155
linsomniac wrote: post #144

My primary use of the Home speakers is playing music in the shower. That experience is actually pretty bad though, over the years between google music and spotify, getting it to play my music is just horribly obtuse. I can't reliably get it to start my music. "Playing a playlist called my favorites" or similar rather than playing my own playlist. At one point after 3-4 failed attempts like this I said "F you" and the…

I never understood why people put smart speakers in their showers. Why is a simple and cheap Bluetooth speaker not good enough? You can get them in any size and shape and sound quality and they (can) work with your phone's built-in "smart" assistant. I never use that though because when I'm in the shower all I want to do is listen to music. Here's my routine, for reference: 1. Turn on the speaker (which is hanging on…

Maybe I'm weird, but my showers don't last more than a song or two (and I shave in the shower), so any effort to play music, smart speaker or dumb, is kind of wasted.

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

#328

Post by boring_twenties »

SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #225
cabalamat wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new one is digital but isn't "smart". 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" devic…

I fully respect when anyone decides they don't want smart devices, but all of your bullet points are quite easy to accomplish with off the shelf devices these days ("unnecessarily complicated" will always be debatable though). 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 de…

I am completely unable to understand why any of these devices need any kind of wireless radio at all.

They're all plugged into wall power all the time, and powerline Ethernet works fine.

What am I missing?

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

#329

Post by rcarmo »

vineyardmike wrote: post #310
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…

> I honestly don’t see the point of nerfing them with fancy “home” UIs that do absolutely nothing useful. 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.

You can easily replace those with tailored web pages - I am using the Homebridge UI on mine now,

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.

Post reply on HN