The Google Home app is finally on the right path
The Google Home app is finally on the right path
After seven years of stagnation, the Google Home app is forging ahead with a better UI, more info and controls, and more powerful routines.
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I'm glad to hear it, but it's going to take a lot more for me to trust that Google isn't going to murder a promising product in its tracks because it doesn't instantly make a billion dollars.
I'm still salty about all my old Google Home speakers dying at the same time.
You might want to consider looking into Home Assistant. It can't do the voice assistant part (yet?) but if you get the right smart devices to go with it, you can be reasonably safe from the usual smart home product stopping working because the maker got bored BS.
Actually, it can do a fair bit of the voice assistant stuff now. It's a bit more janky than off the shelf solutions, but it can be done. It was their big push this year with the "year of voice".
Homeassistant + all Zwave and/or wired KNX devices + Wyoming plug in gives a full voice assistant suite with guaranteed compatibility free from shitty cloud services. The downside is the cost. For that you could go ZigBee with MQTT and have reasonable protection against vendor fuckary
I'm getting rid of all my nest products because they're killing the Nest Secure stuff. Which means my door sensors no longer work.
The nest cams no longer detect and alert me to people walking up to my front door and they alert on sunlight as motion constantly.
I don't care how good their home app is (it's not good), the hardware is garbage and could be killed at any time.
Yup. Moving everything over to HomeAssistant so I can own everything and not have to worry about another company pulling this crap. Helps that it lines up nicely with me moving house.
It's one thing for google to kill apps, but nuking hardware like that should be illegal. Probably is in the EU..?
I would also be turned the hell off if that happened to me, yikes.
At this point, anyone that gets themselves locked into a proprietary ecosystem that falls out from under them only has themselves to blame. So many corpses of "use it with our app" laying in the ditches over the past few years should tell you something, but there's always someone doing it because it's convenient, then crying when it gets bricked a year later.
Just use Home Assistant and take on the pain of open standards equipment. Everything you buy will still be useful a decade from now.
OMG you too? I had two minis die the same week. WTF.
Yep! Minis also. I'm sure there was a bad update that killed a bunch of them, so I have a bad taste in the mouth for their smart home hardware now.
One of my minis too... I've replaced it with a Harman Kardon Citation One. Overkill? Yes, but it's not Google's and they're quite cheap on eBay. Sony makes decent alternatives too.