I fell for the Google Home, and it has gotten significantly worse over time. My only hypothesis is they found ways to reduce the cost of running the server-side, and it does not benefit the consumer.
My Consumer Report: Do not fall for hardware backed by software that costs the seller money to keep running.
It’s internal culture that devalues maintenance and product improvement. Launch gets you promo, maintaining gets you laid off.
I saw a lot of humble and dedicated engineers get laid off in the first round and it was a lot of people who put systems stability over their own promo. There used to be a place for those people, which is part of what made Google a decent place. That’s gone now, things will continue to break as long as fixers take the brunt of lay offs.
I think the point was that it used to be different at Google in the past(I saw it first hand). People ensuring services functioned correctly after launch were valued and rewarded appropriately.
Over time, the value given to maintenance and smooth operations decreased in reviews, esp for 'non core' services, which inevitably led to engineers doing the rational thing and prioritizing launching features, getting credit and moving on before they got saddled with pesky things like maintenance.
This also had the unintended consequence of politicizing work assignments quite a bit with more savvy political operators getting the most opportunities to launch featu ... er 'deliver impact'.
I have a smart home gym that does not run unless it successfully reaches the servers first (I found out after the return period was over, while my WiFi was down for a week). This really shoved this issue to the forefront of my mind and I am now trying to understand the packets it sends and receives with the hope of running a fake host on my home server, redirecting the traffic to a local destination and returning fake data to trick it into thinking it succeeded the fetch and finishes bootup.
The idea that I can't work out because of an internet outage upsets me greatly. Also their recent updates have added more ads into the gym interface which I am not a fan of, so I might just never have it connect to their servers ever again if I get my workaround working.
What device is this? I wonder if Pihole could block the ads for you. It was able to completely remove all of the ads on my LG OLED TV and the UI now looks perfect.
Same, I have nest cameras and nest wifi (now discontinued 2 years later, so can't buy compatible wifi points anymore). Software + Google voice assistant is so goddamn buggy!
I have the Google Wifi pucks because it was only mesh system at the time that offered both wireless and wired backhaul for mesh networks, which was great because I could wire most of it.
I used it as wired until I moved, and my current house I started using it wireless. That's when I discovered a bug in the wireless mesh that requires me to basically restart the network every couple days.
I also wish I didn't need to app to connect to it. I really don't understand why I can't manage it directly from my PC or phone via IP Address like every other system I've used. I regret it, but it is better than having an upstairs and downstairs network I needed to keep switching between with my netgear routers I had before.
I switched from Google Wi-Fi to Eero a few years ago and discovered that almost everything I’d thought were network limitations was some kind of non-obvious problem with the Google Wi-Fi system. Random daily 20 second hangs for iOS devices disappeared, the DNS proxy is now reliable, etc.
The Nest cameras are infuriating. I’ll get an alert, only to tap it and get “This video isn’t available yet. Check back later.”
After all these years, my devices still are split across the Nest and Home apps, and the Home app is still missing features Nest had from day one. Oh yeah and presence sensing doesn’t work since switching to the Google app [0].
I bought an iPhone last year and have been de-Googling since.
I thought it got slower because of Gemini. I have been setting alarms (yeah, I know!) under various conditions and it always worked like magic. It's something I have gotten really REALLY used to now and I'd notice any change.
Also, their AI photo effects never really worked any good for me but I do not own a pro model.
I've got a nest hub max that I use daily, for the most parts my family has learned the key phrases that result in the action we want. But randomly it'll play music from youtube when we only ever want spotify. Randomly it won't display google search results in a usable format.
So even the very simple use cases that we know work, aren't solid.
Then there's the massive disappointment when you just have a quick think about the types of interactions that it could do very well if google cared at all. Honestly, the failure to follow through on what could have been a house hold changing device is just sad to ponder.
Why they haven't rigged it up to gemini yet baffles me.
My Consumer Report: Do not fall for hardware backed by software that costs the seller money to keep running.