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.
that means they will kill it soon 🤣
I mean, now that the UI has been absolutely ruined and it takes 1-2 extra taps for ~everything, "it's finally on the right path".
Fuck modern app design, tbh. And worse that by now people seem to embrace this space-wasting time-wasting nonsense that has become modern "standards" of UI/UX.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they'll put a user interface on it one day. It looks like they had a contest for 6 year olds to design it, and they let the second place winner design it.
it would be if they actually just released a widget to control a speaker directly from your homescreen.
Check out Homeseer, it's a much, much better product and it has excellent developers. It's been around for ages, and the community support is amazing as well.
I mean no disrespect, this is a genuine question: at this point why limit yourself to HomeSeer hardware when Home Assistant has become so user friendly to setup and configure?
Fucking Home Assistant. It does so much. I won't entertain any smarthome gadget that doesn't support a local standard that gets it into HA. It's so liberating to be able to buy any old shit from any old vendor and have it work locally 95% of the time.
Do you have any idea just how angry I am at the implementation of the google home app on smart phones and the stupid pixel tablet?
Lenovo Smart Display that's like 5+ years old? Displays weather, will tell me with a tap what the forecast is for the day and respond when I ask what the weather is like at work with continued conversation. The tablet? The shiny new $500 tablet? Nope. Contextual Conversation? Not a thing. Weather? Read aloud to me as I cook breakfast or make coffee? Nah fam, get wrecked. Have a routine work on the tablet as a target device? Absolutely not. Can't even select it. Have multi-account support work with me and my husband through fingerprint or voice matching? Nope. Cast media with it in docked mode? No. Make it work with my hush routine at 10pm? Throws an error and alerts me on my phone that it can't do that. Picture frame that works with google photos when it senses people nearby but turns the screen off when the room is empty? No. Use it similarly to a nest hub max as a smart home dashboard with user specific useful info like commute times? Not a chance.
Gtfoh.
I don't even have faith anymore. I've been using their services since Android went mainstream
I'm still annoyed that Google killed off the standalone google wifi app so they would integrate it into the home app. It is less intuitive compared to the wifi app.
Heap..still not using it