Google keeps failing its Nest customers
9to5google.com
9to5google.com
For the record I used to be a huge Google fan. Had many of the Pixel phones, had Nest cameras, doorbells, nest secure, nest protects, multiple TV's running Android TV, Stadia (lol), and more.
I don't understand how a company with basically unlimited resources and the best people in the world just completely flops on product strategy time and time again.
That waiting turned into more and more beloved products being shut down, drastically changed to shell versions of themselves, or left to stagnate, while google continued to randomly launch, acquire, shut down other beloved brands.
I am not aware of a single product person in Google. They are very much a tech company. They make / research and develop technology and search for a solution.
Nest was such a great product and brand, and Google completely fucked it up.
I wouldn't say there was a definitive final straw. It was more of a death by a thousand cuts. Everything getting shittier and worse over time. Pixel phones originally were great, but I really wanted a great 1st party watch. Pixel Watch finally came out and it was lightyears behind the Apple Watch.
Software integration wise across the entire ecosystem as well. Google has been promising it, but Apple seems to have actually delivered it.
The Nest stuff hurts though. I've invested well over $3k in various Nest devices over the years, and to see what Google has done to the ecosystem is a shame.
But yes they’re moving into ads. It seems to be “over the top” revenue for them, not a core revenue stream like Google. Apple is basically taking any free internet connected endpoint they provide and tossing ads in (news in stock app, App Store, etc?). It’s annoying but it’s nowhere near as invasive or impactful as any other advertising giant (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc). They’re also way less invasive at tracking you - but they’re as equally opaque at telling you.
Google TV is unusable for 10-30s of refresh depending on how long it has been since you’ve used the TV. It’s the worst part of an otherwise high end TV. The multiple user UX is odd across Google products. You can haplessly sign in to your account for YouTube TV on another family member’s Google (TV) account without it bringing up an account switcher. About five minutes into you wondering why your settings are off (or being annoyed because you realized what happened) you get Google’s suggestion to press the right combination of buttons on the remote to do so. Then you switch accounts and sit through the 30s of account refresh. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Roku is great. It does what you ask. Settings are remembered. The Roku Ultra 4K upscaler produces a great image. I used it to replace the Samsung experience on one of their first Gen OLED TVs that still produces a great image in spite of its slowly failing software stack.
Samsung seems to simply give up on updating the software on the TV at some point. Things start failing over time as services move on past your TV’s software stack. My newer Frame TV is on the newest software stack (for now) and everything works fine in comparison. Probably my biggest annoyance is the laggy UI and that they try really hard to direct you to their free TV channel. You were watching YouTube the last time you watched the TV, but nevermind that. Samsung wants to show you a loud TV show from the 50s on their classic TV channel. Or KPop. Or Hells Kitchen. Not sure why but that is what my Samsung TVs cycle through.
Realize it's cat and mouse with an updatable controlled platform's data exfiltration, but curious if there are any low-maintenance solutions to do some good?
Agree that Rokus are a great solution, but I'm uncomfortable with a one-time-purchase device's long-term revenue priorities.
Also remember that if you’re using cloud TV services, you’re just moving the data aggregation/ad network integrations/resale to that service.
Does that work okay? I would worry that you needed an iOS app to configure it or something. It works as a totally stand-alone device?
I currently have a Sony one with Android TV that I bought in 2017 and software wise it's unusable. I have Apple TV setup for all the media apps and that works well enough though.
My flagship LG oled screen has modal ads that are pushed to my screen when it starts up.
It was a pain to get mine repaired by them. They sent me to a "local" repair shop (40ish minutes drive away), who despite being their only authorized repair shop in the area, couldn't get any parts off Google for it, and wouldn't for months to come (and indicated this is just a constant story for them, and that what I was seeing was very common). Google essentially wasted a bunch of my time driving back and forth to repair shops. Then I had to send it to them and it sat unacknowledged (despite having delivery confirmation) for well over a week. They did at least send me a complete replacement, but my assumption has to be it's going to do exactly the same thing again.
For my wife's phone, they argued that because I clicked a wrong button in their repair website despite logging the phone as broken in time that it died after the warranty expired. I had a long argument with them, then gave up and decided I'd take my trade elsewhere.
In both cases, their attitude towards me as a customer was absolute bullshit. I've never had to work so hard to get someone to acknowledge that a phone could stop working, without having done anything to it.
I like the hardware and the pure Android experience as an end user. I'm not willing to deal with hostile customer support to get it.
[1] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/11833075?hl=en
In what way did it die? My wifes 4a stopped reading the sim card, any sim card. Even after a factory reset. Its over two years old and I haven't bothered to try and argue for a replacement yet. She's moved to Samsung Flip as its even smaller (when folded) and not a pixel.
Really disappointing, I've never had the sim card reader just fail like that. I guess its a cheap component thats died.
Picked it up off the my desk to going use it, and it was powered off, never turned back on again.
Wife woke up to hers dead.
If I had an iPhone, I would roll up into an Apple Store and get a new device on the spot, no questions asked. It would fully restore a backup of my old phone within a hour, and I'd forget it ever happened.
But I had a Pixel.
Google doesn't have Google Stores (they did have one in NYC, but it was mostly a pop-up to show off their stuff staffed by contractors), so I was relegated to their chat support. They told me I needed to take it to a local UBreakIFix to get the lens repaired. Since it would take them two days to get the part and replace it, I landed up buying an iPhone instead.
Inter-product-area rivalries/competitions/dysfunctions. Product manager attention span problems. High ego, high-status engineers with nice new technological hammers (e.g. Flutter, Fuchsia, Dart) that absolutely need to find nails, so go take other people's projects to rewrite.
Working in Home / Nest PA was very trying on the patience. They were bad for it, but the problem is endemic to anything user-facing at Google (see also Play Music vs YouTube Music, ChromeOS vs Android, Android Things, etc. etc.)
but "shipping the org chart" really explains a lot of tech good and bad.
When sj was at apple, product was well-integrated software and hardware (as he ruled the org chart, which left no space for rivalries and fiefdoms)
with every sh*tty iot device that phones home, marketing in the org chart makes for a monetized, not-private mess for customers.
Even if their time and attention were finite, they inspired a credible worry throughout the company that they might suprisingly appear and demand answers on why a team is @$&@ing up tech / UX, as PMs/VPs rightly asked themselves "Do I want to be explaining my behavior to X?"
Which seemed to tamp down on the amount of inter-fiefdom rivalries and wasted time.
I don't get the impression many people are worried about Pichai breathing tech/ UX fire from on high in the same way.
To the contrary, Google culture (including, presumably, Pichai's views) is explicitly to try lots of competing ideas within Google and to disrupt from within. What other company would have Gmail and (previously) Inbox, multiple music services, a gazillion messaging apps, and so on?
This isn't a failure of management or accountability, this is consciously chosen policy at the highest levels. Resources go towards self-disruption by launching more new things in the same category, rather than choosing to focus on one and committing to it. This is why people are promoted for launches rather than for maintenance and support.
The upside is that Google launches way more products and could dramatically up its odds of success in a category. The downside is products fail because they don't get the support to see them through, consumers are totally confused by redundant products, and Google gets a reputation for cancelling products which might actually hinder future adoption (at least in some tech circles).
Obviously Google still seems to think the upside outweighs the downside... while many on HN come to the opposite conclusion. :)
E.g. the topical buying Nest, but then force folding it into Google Home
That's the opposite of letting the best solution among competing options win.
The broader issue is that it doesn't seem like there's a CEO who shows up in the Google Home's team meeting and live demos the broken and missing features, shows them on Nest, and then demands answers for why this wasn't done before they forced migration.
As has been quipped on here, Pichai seems to act more like a Google advocate who avoids rocking the internal boat, versus the rabid user advocate that Gates / Jobs / Bezos reportedly were.
And when there's no one you're afraid of at the top... of course the organization devolves into petty fiefdoms and bickering, at the expense of users.
They eventually choose to sunset one, and simplify brands, but in a really haphazard, broken-features way, just like we're seeing here.
But again, the issue isn't that the CEO's not checking up on the details. It's not one of quality control. It's that they don't care. It's not process, it's goals. I can't imagine Sundar wasn't briefed that the migration will involve missing features, and he signed off on that.
Because Google's core values are about trying lots of new things, with a focus on scalability and search and machine learning and metrics. Google's core values are very specifically not about maintaining consistent quality, committing to products, or guaranteeing features -- or being a "user advocate" as you mention.
So this is all just to reiterate. These aren't process failures. These are Google's processes working as intended. The Nest failures here are simply a reflection of Google's actual goals.
That makes it impossible to ship their organogram.
Apple seems to have escaped it mostly by centralizing power, but I don't think they are currently keeping it.
Google's consumer products lack that. Google has an ad machine that just produces seemingly infinite cash. The hardware and consumer facing stuff is a sideshow. So it escapes project discipline.
For Google, it's hard to pretend to be the Good Guys when your main (and only) business is monopolizing internet ads.
Google has a bunch of managers all vying to get their own promotions and will not hesitate to fuck over both users and other teams just for their moment of glory at Google I/O. And all of this stems from the fact that there's no leadership at Google, with an absolute inability to rally troops together on a single, common goal.
Behind all that stuff is an incredibly competent smart SRE team keeping the lights on and keeping things very efficient and reliable. And some boring but diligent SWEs writing the rather boring code to do all that boring stuff. That's what the real Google is, but it's invisible to the public.
But all that ads money needs to be spent somewhere. And you can't grow your staff forever doing "boring" stuff. And if there's an exciting interesting project inside Google it's flies to shit, people stepping over each other for promotion.
AFAIK they fixed the infighting more than a decade ago. That's why you don't see it causing problems. But also AFAIK (because I was never there), forced competition got all the way into single developers.
It is science :-)
Conway's law: ..complex products end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. The law is applied primarily in the field of software architecture, though Conway directed it more broadly and its assumptions and conclusions apply to most technical fields.
And what is obviously missing from this scenario is anyone in the Google organization that has the slightest care or concern for any customer need. Also strongly correlates with their obvious zero customer support / you-re-on-your-own practices. The entire company is just "what can we foist off on them this week?".
I just hope they don't screw up self driving cars, where they're actually succeeding.
The Nest smoke alarms at a friend’s house say (as in play over the speakers a voice saying) “Remote access attempt detected” every so often while we’re sitting in the living room. At least twice a year they go off in the middle of the night (without smoke).
So I guess when you’re contacting customers who don’t want it, and your alarms wrongly sound, I would say you have a problem with your false positive rate
I’d happily pay a premium for smoke alarms less prone to false alarms, but none such exist as far as I can tell.
You may want to swap type of smoke alarms (photoelectric vs ionization): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector#Design
The other may be better suited for your environment (e.g. humidity, particulates, etc).
I've never had a false alarm with the "smooth edge" First Alert model, for example: https://www.amazon.com/Detector-Hardwired-Battery-Backup-6-P...
And have had it go off when the daughter lit a candle underneath, so know it works!
We replaced with this: https://www.lowes.com/pd/First-Alert-3120B-6-Pack-AC-Hardwir...
I've been reading "Build" by Tony Fadell. It's just painful to read what Nest could have been. The V3 is nice, but there are still rough edges, the app loads slowly for example (no doubt because it needs data from the device via a cloud). And it is absolutely ridiculous how much trouble it is to let it talk to Home Assistant. Of course Tony is focused on the normal users (who just want stuff to work together, they don't care about open local APIs or Matter for example), which is a shame but understandable.
At this point: Please Google just opensource the firmware or something, add a local api and be done with it. It feels like they just don't want to support the device. Such a shame, it's such a nice thermostat (hardware-wise an ethernet cable to the heatlink would have been nice, to optionally drop the dependency on wireless, I'd pay for that).
Also read Build and I'm sure Tony is just sad at seeing the opportunity lost as Nest becomes a shell of itself.
Ecobee released their first smart thermostat 3 years prior to the first Nest Thermostat. (Not that that's a fault, I've been a happy ecobee user for years.)
It's a shame, Fadell was right to go into the thermostat market. Honeywell still has nothing that looks nice, and, according to the reviews, nothing that functions well. The stuff that comes with HVAC systems are generally expensive but cheap feeling and imho ugly.
In the EU all manufacturers have to support OpenTherm, an open standard, so you'd think this is a big homogeneous market to enter...
Nobody can build a nice app based on such an API. The official app tried - there were spinners on every part of the UI. Even simple things like 'give me a graph of network bandwidth' would have gaps in the graph where the single threaded service was bogged down with other requests.
It's absolutely breathtaking how bad Google is at shipping functioning software. I don't know how Rick Osterloh or Rishi Chandra still have jobs, but they should answer for the following litany of catastrophic product decisions:
* Google decides to abandon Nest as a separate, highly-prized brand and product line, and instead bring everything under the Google Home umbrella. This process is excruciating and a monumental, half-decade-long failure. It is the very definition of a legacy rewrite pattern gone awry, but coupled with billions of dollars of purchased, installed hardware in people's actual homes.
* This starts with the "force Nest users to have a Google account to use Nest" and "Googlekill Works With Nest" decisions. Google decides to gate certain features and to encourage people to upgrade to the Google Home implementation of the Nest functionality, but completely left feature parity a decade behind.
To wit, Google Home's app, beyond being buggy, also can't do basic things like allow for easy scrubbing of video feeds, or control of the Nest Protect smoke detectors.
* Google also willfully murders Works With Nest, and kills with it the goodwill of hundreds of manufacturers who were pretty excited to build compatible products and services. This is migrated to a Works with Google/Assistant product that... again, completely lacks parity. They break the Home/Away functionality entirely. They delay this process a bit, and Works with Google catches up in some ways, but it takes literal years.
* Google releases a new line of Nest Cams that... don't work with the Nest app. Indeed, you have to activate them in the Google Home app, and their feeds will not display in the Nest app. From a Product Manager perspective, this is very easy to back into: Google is on a slow, death-march termination of the Nest app, in favor of migrating to Google Home. Rather than building any new functionality into the Nest app (these new cams included battery and floodlight functions, for example), they decided it made more sense to force users to use the Google Home app.
Except... the Google Home app STILL lacks parity with the now-8-year-old Nest app. The Google Home app, as of May the 8th in the year of our lord 2023, does not support the fantastic SightView video scrubbing functionality. Or, as it happens, ANY scrubbing functionality. It doesn't support the ability to generate and download video clips. And the web version, which has been in a public preview for over a year, STILL doesn't support the ability to even view the pre-tagged movement sessions that you can view in the mobile app.
But to say this again: new Nest Cam users cannot view 100% of the video recorded by the Nest Cams. It is functionally impossible and completely ridiculous, considering the Dropcam/earlier Nest Cams have been able to do this for literally a decade.
* Beyond that sheer lunacy, Rick Osterloh gets up on stage and has the temerity to announce with a big dumb grin on his face the Nest Doorbell: the "upgrade" (in literally no metric) from the older Nest Hello. This product has two variants: a wired and battery powered version, for people who don't have doorbell wiring. The wired product manages to ship into end users' hands with a curious limitation: even when wired, the product is INCAPABLE of recording 24-hour footage. Note that the Nest Hello, launched in 2017, supported this functionality out of the box and still does. When pressed for a reason, Rick says that the thermals were a limitation, coupled with how thin they wanted to make the product.
I'll say this again slowly: for some reason, a Product Manager at Google thought that the THINNESS of a PERMANENTLY INSTALLED, FIXED LOCATION VIDEO DOORBELL was more important than its ability to actually record video reliably. How on earth do these people still have jobs?
* Which brings us to two weeks ago. Google had already announced back in 2020 that they were killing the brilliantly designed, beautiful, extremely functional, nearly perfect Nest Secure alarm system. They stopped selling it, and then sunk $450M of money into ADT for... literally what reason, no one on planet earth can say. At the time, they announced they'd continue to support the Nest Secure.
Well, that's no longer compatible with their designs to migrate people to the Google Home app, or to return their boondoggle style investment in ADT, so two weeks ago, Google announced that they'll be bricking every single person's Nest Secure, along with their (also) brilliantly designed hybrid Nest Detects: their combination motion and door open sensors, which _also_ feature a muting button and little nightlight. These things are a wonder of design, and still function perfect, and Google has decided to literally pull the plug and create an entire mountain of e-waste for the hell of it.
They're offering users a free ADT system, which includes an ENORMOUS hub that is literally 5 times the size of the Nest Guard hub, and two motion and door sensors. That's it. There are users who spent hundreds and even thousands of dollars on Google's Nest Secure hardware, buying additional Nest Detect sensors, and they're all going into the trash now and literally no one knows why.
Worse, the new product is markedly worse in every way. The ADT Hub is ENORMOUS. It has no business being this big. It does literally everything the Nest Guard does, but the Nest Guard is 1/5th the size, and tastefully designed. This thing looks like one of those massive cable modem/wireless router hybrids, except it's also your keypad for disarming your system. Gross. (Nest Guard crammed in battery backup, wifi, Nest Thread, cellular backup, a voice speaker, and an alarm siren into a very tasteful package.)
Beyond that, Nest is also inherently stripping another piece of brilliant design for NO REASON: The Nest x Yale door lock (which I have three of in my house) currently unlocks my door AND disarms my security system automatically when I get home. It's hard to describe how amazing this functionality is. There is absolutely no indication that there will be any way to get the replacement ADT system to disarm from the door lock, even though Google has floated this idea of "Routines" (and a script engine) for over a year , with nothing to show for it.
So in a year, I'll literally have to throw away my perfectly good Nest Guard and Nest Detects. I'm creating e-waste. I'll be replacing them with an uglier system with more parts and less functionality. How is this a win, Google?
If I strip out the most cynical view of what's happening here (Google wanting to amp up sales of the ADT product they've invested in, but maybe not, because, again, they're actually giving these things away for free to Nest Secure users, so ostensibly losing money here), I can again understand how they came to such a hamfisted decision: they don't want to migrate the Nest Secure functionality into the Google Home app, and they signed a dumb agreement with ADT to sunset it.
But once again, Google chooses to ignore the reputational damage and damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. They'll brick your perfectly functional hardware and make you downgrade to the newer, shittier model. And no one over there has the power to stop it? What the hell is Sundar doing over there, other than firing people and cashing insanely fat bonus checks?
Meanwhile, Google also:
* Migrated the Google Home Hubs away from legacy Linux OS to Fuschia, and then promptly murdered the Thread functionality that the locks and thermostat work with, removing a mesh network component
* Still hasn't released a video scrubber for their new cameras. I cannot conceive of how this has taken them so long. This is the same company that owns YouTube, YouTubeTV, and... checks notes... the existing, already functional Nest app that does exactly what we want
* Is ALSO killing old legacy Dropcams. More e-waste. These cameras work just fine, but Google is murdering them anyway. They're shipping you a replacement if you're an active Nest Aware subscriber, but only for up to two cameras.
* Is NOT offering ANY compensation AT ALL for Nest Secure users outside of the US. They're just willfully destroying your $400-$1500+ investment for the hell of it.
* Claims to be environmentally minded but generates e-waste with these deprecations.
Google should take a page out of Sonos's book, when they caught the unholy backlash for their equally stupid idea of bricking legacy Sonos products: spin them out to a legacy app. Or build a connector, or open-source the firmware, or rewrite the firmware to even work with ADT. There are so many options that could be pursued in the year they've given us before they murder this thing. You would think a literal trillion dollar company could find their way here, but time and time again, Google proves that they don't know how to release hardware with a cohesive strategy. It's all spray and pray, and it's ridiculous.
* Oh, and they're doing all sorts of stupid stuff with FitBit too, but I won't even get into that.
How. Do. These. People. Still. Have. Jobs. There. How do they expect to ever be trusted by anyone again? How do they think this is a good or right call, and why is no one speaking up and advocating for their USERS? I'm genuinely asking. I don't work there, I don't understand how something like this happens.
I played a minor bit role in shipping the original Nest Home Hubs. They sold like hotcakes. Huge success. Was kind of proud of them despite all their technical warts internally. Within a few months of launch they were already rewriting the whole UI and OS stack (Fuchsia, Flutter). Which was predictably literally years late by the time it shipped, and now of course they're killing the whole line. And the whole time we were working on the original product it was in brutal internal competition with a similar product built on Android but which was a total commercial failure and relegated to disinterested third parties (and just got finally taken off life support)
It really is like nobody there had ever read any foundational software engineering planning texts. The arrogance and incompetence is outstanding, especially when you notice how incredibly smart all the people working on it are, but behave collectively stupid.
But I wanted to clarify about video recording and viewing 100% of clips:
there are two service levels from Google: either you’re grandfathered on older pricing plans per camera and can see a 24/7 recording or you upgrade to new plans per household that they sell now where the camera only records and sends motion or sounds, not 24/7 feed recordings like the old Dropcam used to.
You can’t buy the old way of recording 24/7 from every camera as far as I know, and the only reason I can think of that they switched recording modes is because it saves power and is more efficient so hardware might not break as often via overheating. I mean, they might claim it is more efficient for storage, but they have stationary cameras - compression has to be good, right?
Anyway, just pointing out that generating clips from video recordings is kind of the old way, and the new way is that it somehow automatically makes clips for you as motion alerts.
But… outside of that I agree 100% that Nest has been basically dead since the rebranding. That Ecobee still has any unique features Google doesn’t have largely stems from this lack of innovation.
Ecobee is now owned by a company that makes generators, the kind that runs on gas or diesel. It’s hard to imagine that Google can’t ship new features, apps or software products faster than a company that makes industrial appliances and yet here we are.
Google makes too much money from ads to care about any other way to make money, long term. I’m shocked they don’t just give away these smart devices and wire them up to play YouTube ads with facial recognition at this point.
Maybe they’re waiting for Amazon to try it first, or want to experiment with Google TV ads like Fire TV and Samsung already do. If my Apple TV ever starts auto-playing trailers and ads, I’m going to permanently switch to using AirPlay, I think.
As for the Dropcam, maybe I’ll replace it with an iCloud video camera when the time comes…
Also surprises me no one hits Google for their environmental hypocrisy when we're talking about purely induced e-waste here. The fact that the Nest Detects and Nest Guards are being made useless is so galling to me. Replacing them with an objectively worse option is the Google piss on the shit sundae.
Many years ago, I bought a bunch of Chromecast Audio devices - these are/were little wifi dongles with a 3.5mm jack and USB power. I could set them up as a group and they'd sync perfectly with each other. I had a pretty cheap multi-room sound system.
Then at some point, the Google app I was using for them stopped working and it transpired the functionality had been moved to "Google Home". Over the following few months I spent hours turning the things off and on again, resetting them, re-creating groups, but it never worked for more than a few hours. I gave up, went back to bluetooth.
Google Home needs to die.
Had the old Nest thermostat and a few cameras for ~7 years. All worked pretty well with the Nest app.
I moved and bought the cheaper Nest thermostat E ~18 months ago, and it is without a doubt, the worst thermostat I have ever seen. First, it won't even run without being connected to the Google Home app. Then, app setup would fail repeatedly with a generic "Failed to setup" message. I had to get on Reddit to discover it doesn't work with G Workspace accounts.
And after all of that, the touch controls are next to impossible to use. And they somehow managed to make setting the temperature incredibly confusing. Like using an app should make that easier, but it is far, far harder than the on-device config screen on the Honeywell thermostat from 2004. It's.... I don't understand.
THEN, last week, something happened and I can no longer access any of the old Nest stuff in Google Home. It was in a separate Google account, and everything just disappeared. And Google wants me to verify access to that account using some bizarre onetime code setting buried in my phone, which repeatedly fails. So I can't use any of that stuff either.
I hate ranting on the internet, but wow this has gotten out of hand.
Without knowing, I'd expect Bosch and all the others to have a similar product, just five years late, slightly more expensive due to more realistic accounting, extremely boring, and without any of the shortcomings that GP has listed. Those are the ones that will last for decades. Their apps will never be amazing, but they'll last.
I wish these companies had some sort of open source pact built into the licensing, eg after 3 years the support window ends but the software becomes open source. We won't solve your problems anymore but you/the community can if you want.
That would be amazing...
Overall, I'm a huge fan of Google in many areas, but the amount of unforced errors they've made is undeniable.
I don't care that they "kill" lots of services, but it does sting when they screw up something good.
Rather than an exhaustive list of every minor app/service/feature they've eliminated, what are their biggest screw ups?
1) Chat 2) Google Reader 3) Google Buzz 4) Nest/Home 5) Pay/Wallet 6) ???
1) New build system for Android, because https://xkcd.com/927/
2) Security architectural changes that patch theoretical issues of the 7th dimension, and mess up all existing apps unless the developer rewrites 80% of the codebase
3) Pixel n+1 with more mega-everything (megapixels, megabytes of memory, megahertz per cpu, etc)
I'll never trust them again with locking myself into their ecosystem. The worry is when you buy into something like Nest, who later go on to be brought into Google.
Of course the web-connected parts like positioning on a map or sharing online broke long ago, but they appear to have neglected to build in a kill switch so mere user me can keep on getting shit done, invulnerable to their idiocy-of-the-day
I've got a precious Lightroom 6 license so I've been sticking with that.
Obviously one cannot prevent things like that from happening, but when they do, you can decide to migrate to something else and just sell your existing (now Google) gear, to avoid Googley issues down the line.
It may be cynical, but at that point the resale value might still be good because not everyone has caught on to Google being Google like this.
The Ring with a similar vantage point detects it every time.
[0]: https://9to5google.com/2023/01/21/fuchsia-area-120-google-la...
Turns out they only learn for the first few weeks. After three calls with tech support, we reset it enough times that it learned how to turn on the heat by 11am on weekdays.
Perhaps someday someone will have the patience to try and get auto-learning working on the weekends too.
I gave up and just have Alexa do time based automations to set temperatures. At least until google kills the nest api.
I always found it funny how google’s “AI” is so stupid when it comes to user satisfaction instead of making them money.
I'm much more locked into Apple's ecosystem but at least Apple works very hard to ensure compatibility and supports hardware for many more years than Google does (with updates, etc.)
Settled on Ecobee for HVAC and Ring for everything else (did you know that Ring is an Amazon company? no? That's because Amazon doesn't mess with companies they acquire and try to shove everything into their Amazon Alexa app to double-down on failing corporate strategies).
The promo-driven development there really needs to stop.
They seems to be dropping the ball across a big range of businesses, including ads and search
Leadership seems to be struggling and employees not happy
Where is google going and why is their stock going up?
In what specific ways has Google failed its customers with Nest products? Is it just the app (the only thing mentioned in the article)?
> I will not invest money in equipment operated by Google.
?
Because what you have now seems inconsistent.