> I’m a Works with Nest developer. Will I be able to access and control Nest devices moving forward?
> No. The Actions on Google Smart Home platform does not provide open API access to Nest devices, so it cannot be used to access and control Nest devices. Instead, managing and controlling Google Home, Nest, and thousands of third-party smart home devices is done through the Google Home app and the Google Assistant.
Wow, just wow. The entire non-Google Nest ecosystem evaporates overnight.
I lived through the Twitter ecosystem collapse and now I'm a VC I worry about investing in startups that are built on any large ecosystem where there isn't an alignment of clear economic interest.
Google of all people doing this just made it tougher for everyone else to maintain confidence in large vendor platforms.
Here's a note, straight from quotes file, I took around the original Twitter fiasco, and have since reposted or mentioned on HN a few times on occasions similar to this:
* Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology:
"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with API of Twitter perfectly.
--
Twitter did that twice[0] already, but it's a lesson people have to learn and relearn repeatedly: this is what happens when you build a business entirely around someone else's platform.
Between this and the infamous hacker group called "The Shadow Brokers" I think it's time someone did a study on the influence of Mass Effect on tech culture.
Not me, though - I'm in the middle of some calibrations right now.
[Spoiler alert, Hyperion series]
That sounds totally lifted from the Hyperion series, but maybe the idea is earlier than that, does anyone have a proposed source for that idea that's earlier than 1989?
The writers were big Sci-Fi fans. The Asari were heavily influenced by the Minbari of Babylon 5. There are lots of other callouts to classic Sci-Fi in the series.
The bones of the setting and plot, the tone, plus lots of details, are so heavily borrowed from B5 that it's practically a kind of remix.
Not complaining, though, since [heresy incoming] they seem to have said "what if we took B5's setting but tweaked it to make it better" and then did it.
I will always be mad about the ME3 ending. If reincarnation is something that happens, my reincarnated self will be mad about the ME3 ending from birth.
The endings didn't take into account any of the choices you'd made up until that point. The endings were also a bit brief before the ending patch. I think those were people's biggest complaints, I could be misremembering.
Highly recommend the trilogy! Great story, amazing characters, pretty great gameplay (especially after #1), and overall an immersive journey. I wasn't bothered at all by the ending, personally.
The Reapers definitely fill a similar role as the Hegemony's TechnoCore, but the idea is so general: bigger, smarter entities leverage their natural advantage over smoller, dumber ones (who are sympathetic and protagonistic and somehow win love powers the universe shh it's ok).
If you build on someone else's platform, the best case is you get to be a sharecropper and can make money as long as you don't make so much that your platform-betters get jealous.
The more typical case is this, where you get to spend your time and money doing real-world R&D and discovery of what works for them, for free.
If you're going to dance with a vampire, don't be surprised when it bites you.
You can build alongside someone else's long-term demonstrated strategy (developing Microsoft desktop software) much more securely than developing a feature in someone else's closed garden.
You can also spread your footprint. As just an easy-to-discuss example, Facebook and Twitter develop for many different someone else's platforms, by supporting multiple browsers [who in turn support multiple OSs], multiple mobile platforms, etc.
Developing Microsoft desktop software you're still building on someone else's platform and hoping they don't decide to alter the terms of the deal. Microsoft may be more forward thinking than Google, but companies change.
Absolutely. That risk is much lower than developing for the Alexa, Nest, Twitter, etc platforms. At some point, you’re forced to build on someone else’s platform(s), even if that platform is “Intel” or “AWS” as no one is doing the entire end-to-end value chain.
Or build on an open an open source stack. Don't like Intel? Switch to AMD. Don't like AWS? Switch to another cloud.
Proprietary platforms lure developers to their stack by making development easy. Learning an open source is typically more difficult, but the reward is greater freedom. Believing you're forced to build on proprietary technology is a fallacy.
This is the kind of thinking that leads startups to build their own autoscaling for their pre revenue CRUD app. Trying to roll your own cloud infrastructure will kill you far quicker than AWS shutting down your service.
And you will always be relying on someone else's proprietary tech - whether it's laptops or power stations or cloud infra. The trick is deciding then to outsource and when to build your own.
There are a number of business models that are compatible with open source. But the question here isn't whether to open source your own software or not. The issue is whether it's a good idea to build on somebody else's proprietary stack.
It's in the long term interest of any business not to rely on the goodwill of some other business. This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
Agreed. What's funny is that people now think Microsoft is this warm and fuzzy thing. They used to be far worse than they are today. For example, Microsoft Excel is nothing less than Microsoft's successful attempt to destroy Lotus 1-2-3. If the owner of the platform thinks you're getting too big for your britches, you can bet they'll try to take your revenue.
A difference is that Microsoft (currently) can't render your install base useless. If Microsoft drops Windows (or core Windows APIs) your existing users can stil use your software. With Google or Twitter shutting down "cloud"/web APIs all is gone.
People seem to have forgotten that Microsoft's unofficial motto is "Where do we want you to go today?" They've made an empire out of cutting off competition by changing their ecosystem.
Microsoft is all about cloud and web now. Clients are supposed to be web browser (asp.net) or mobile (xamarin), and they plan to add java, objc and swift interop to better target android and ios.
It is possible. We just have to prioritize open standards much more than we have been doing in the last decade.
History really repeats itself in this regard. First we get ourselves in a tight situation with lots of closed platforms, which is bad for everyone. Then someone comes along, spouting a new philosophy of openness (Stallman comes to mind). The philosophy takes hold and open technology flourishes for a while.
But then a huge corporation appears, offering to contribute to this new abundant ecosystem with great new things. By now, people are too relaxed and optimistic, so they readily accept this. Yet, little by little, the corporation exploits this, seizing more and more control, until we get right back where we started.
It's worse than Twitter. Twitter made a strategic decision (correct or not) that applied across their entire business. Google are making this decision and calculating or hoping that it's in isolation from the rest of their business. That really doesn't seem to be the case.
For the rest of their business' life, Google APIs will be met with skepticism about their long-term prospects. That sucks, because it doesn't seem good for anyone. Not good for Google. Not good for their customers. Not good for 3rd party developers.
Per many comments left on HN, the people that this does benefit are the PMs. It seems that a well-worn path to promotion at google is to launch products. Hence, the reason we have umpteen chat apps. Once the promotion occurs, it seems, the product is all but forgotten, having served it's purpose: a raise.
The divocring of incentives at google are at fault. The PMs aren't incentivied to do what is best for google, as it conflict with what is best for the PMs' families, college funds, mortgages, and health care. Hence, they do what is best for them at the expense of google.
I've already held that opinion of Google products for some time after seeing what a ghost town Sites and Docs are, and the shutdowns of Reader, G+, Wave, etc. At best it seems that you can count on a product silently losing support for years as a hint that you should migrate.
Well, the good news is that Google is kind of outing itself as a true outlier in that space. They clearly do not care at all about hurting developers that build on their platforms and there is enough daylight between them and other large tech companies on this that you probably don't need to extrapolate from Google to the entire tech world.
Makes me sad to say it as someone who has often defended Google in the past, but I can't on this.
Google and Amazon are ruthlessly strangling tech startups and smaller mom & pop shops that latch on to something and see a big spike in sales. They have all the data on these companies already, and people are just waiting to jump in and takeover or destroy a company completely regardless of industry or location. They just borg cube consume any success and very few people make any money in this process. This is happening every day, multiple times per day.
That's a way bigger problem than relying on an API or building some app in garden.
Reading thru it, it is not as brutal as it sounds, more that the they merged it into the Google Assistant API, removing direct access permission to the NEST device (remember microphone-gate with NEST) and consolidating those permissions into Assistant.
Whilst they are killing it off, they have a transition.
However, as far as timelines go - August 2019 kill off date for the NEST API is brutal and not exactly the grace period users of connected devices/software will appreciate or in many a cases with tech designed for non-technical people - know nothing until suddenly in August find what was working yesterday is now not working.
Be interesting to get the perspective of the Assistant API for NEST interaction over the current NEST API. Any functionality that is now no-longer an option and show-stopper? Any improvements?
Still, they could of done what they did with Map's and monerterised the API. Not that there is nothing stopping them doing that with the Assistant API. Which with some businesses has become the norm.
Maybe API's need some sort of Long Term Support flavours, least be much fairer for any transitions taken down the line.
I've posted here a few times, but from what I can see at this point, these things (which I use on a daily basis and are the major reasons why I went with Nest):
* Can't get Nest camera or Nest doorbell video or images programmatically (without asking a google home device directly). This was the main reason why I sold my Ring and bought a Nest, since Ring didn't allow real time video streaming)
* Can't programmatically set or get the nest thermostat temperature, humidity, or home/away status (again, without asking a google assistant device directly).
* I can't get notifications of status changes any more. No more API access to things like notifications when someone rings the doorbell, or a camera sees a person.
* I don't know for sure, but from what I can see this kills any and all Alexa integration.
* And similarly, unless samsung has been blessed by google specifically, SmartThings integrations will go away.
There aren't any real improvements since the Nest products were already available from the google assistant system. And while you can argue many of the new-ish features (like being able to ask the google assistant screen devices to see the camera or get notifications on google home devices for doorbell rings) are improvements since they didn't really use the previous "works with nest" APIs, it's basically trading the ability for anyone to use those APIs, to only google being able to use them and give those abilities out to specific players they allow.
I've actually already thought about that a bit! Apparently there's a hacker still inside me with a penchant for self-torture that really wants to see how far I can take that interface!
Technically you can do text input in the app already, and I believe they have an SDK that allows you to send your own info to the assistant and get responses of some kind. I'm honestly not sure about that, but i'm curious to see if there is something there I can work with. (and if the pricing model of it follows other google APIs, their "free" tier is probably more than enough to handle a single user, and each hacker-oriented "user" could just setup their own project which is how we also used the nest APIs).
I can then find a set of "commands" that I can feed to the "HID" (for lack of a better term), and create an extremely unofficial API around that...
Getting video back is going to be tough, but maybe with some extreme abuse of the chromecast APIs and that same HID->API interface I can get the google assistant to "cast" the camera feed to a faked chromecast and then pull the stream from there...
But as much as I like to daydream about that kind of stuff, i'm not going to do it. I don't need my google account shut down for abuse (imo probably rightfully so in that case, i'm sure that's against all kinds of terms!), and I don't want to support this decision if they do end up going through with this and don't provide an adequate replacement. So I'll probably just sell my Nest devices like I did previously with my Ring, and find another solution that won't pull the rug out from under me.
I am pretty sure that the main use case of Works With Nest is to tell the thermostat to go up and down. I don't believe you can do that with Works With Google Assistant.
At Google, no one wants to work on existing things. You must create new product/feature to get promoted. Then you move on and thing gets shutdown. This is direct consequences of their internal incentive structure.
The big problem here is that there are a lot of people that have spent a lot of money in buying quality hardware that isn't just for leisure, it's for protection. I'll cite my 4 Nest Protects and an outdoor camera as an example. If somehow they get "sunsetted" due to some Google whim, fad or Because They Can, then I'm going to be pretty p*ssed to say the least. Based on past experience I don't trust Google to act in the users interest.
It's especially annoying when you bought a product specifically because it wasn't a Google product and you had confidence that the developers would leave the devices fully functional for its lifetime, then the company gets bought out by Google and the APIs get shut down or sucked into some goddamn cloud service nonsense.
Google is notorious for abandoning past projects. They are of the "try everything and fail fast" variety, and I wouldn't trust my money with their hardware. Not even software, except for Docs and Gmail.
This is why I feel like Stadia is doomed to failure from the start. It took Microsoft failing for an entire generation, even when they brought some new technology to the table, to start seeing real mindshare in the video game industry.
I don't see Google running a service at a loss for half a decade.
And some people dont realize the amount of work Microsoft puts into backwards compatibility. Just look at articles describing the leaked Windows source they describe Microsoft putting in code to path third party Windows software to make sure it still works.
This is also why Wine struggles from version / config to version / config. They cant account for every edge case the way Microsoft does / has. Microsoft by comparison has unlimited resources while Wine is just volunteers who can only test so much software.
I'm waiting for the day when Google decides to raise/lower the temperature of millions of homes by 1 degree to brag about how much energy they've saved.
From what I can see so far, there isn't any way to replicate 90% of the functionality through the assistant APIs, and even their FAQ and messaging seems to be reinforcing that they won't be adding it.
For example, you can't grab images from a camera through the assistant API, you can't get notification of a doorbell ring, you can't get notified when one of the devices detects a person.
This seems to include all of us using them in open-source "hobbyist" environments, like Home Assistant and Node-Red. I'm quite frustrated by this; I'll never buy another Nest product again, and I now regret my purchase of the Nest Thermostat.
All the rest of my IoT stuff is either open-source hardware/software, or at the least local-only with known protocol interfaces. This was the one exception I made for IoT "cloud", giving Google the benefit of the doubt. I regret deeply giving them that benefit now.
The month Google originally bought Nest, I sold my thermostat to someone else and picked up an Insteon thermostat instead. My Insteon thermostat's been a reliable partner since, and doesn't send my data to anyone. I actually turned a profit on it, since I got rebate credit from my electric company originally for buying it.
I'm really happy with the Ecobee as well. The Alexa integration in the newer model doesn't work well possibly due to inferior microphones, in my experience, but I didn't want that anyway so it fits my needs perfectly.
In a few years, it will also return a profit due to an at-purchase and annual credit that my electricity utility provides.
Glad to see a recommendation for the Insteon thermostat. I have a Nest, but Insteon light switches (and other low voltage controls) throughout so that seems like the logical upgrade path.
Another thing I use that's quite handy is the wireless thermostat from Insteon. It's really more of a remote control/temperature sensor, but it integrates nicely. You can see the temperature from both units, and select which one is the master (the one it's trying to get to the set temperature).
I have pets which don't do well above a certain temperature so I keep my wireless unit by them.
"Design" is far from my key value metric in a thermostat. When I had my Nest, it looked pretty, but I kept having to re-set the temperature because they'd add some new smart feature that didn't behave the way I wanted to. I ended up largely crippling the crud out of it to begin with.
And of course, after I sold it there was the incident where a server error caused everyone's heat to stop working, so the fact that my pets didn't freeze to death that day made a big impact on me too. ;)
Nest is actually far from great thermostate, definitely not "iPhone" of thermostate. It doesn't allow lots of manual settings and it doesn't handle anything more than simple systems well. There is lot of marketing that is blinding but not much substance. You should check out thermostats like Ecobee instead.
You might actually have reasons for a lawsuit, if you can reasonable make the court believe that the reason for your purchase was the advertised works with nest API.
If a feature that was advertised is removed after sale, this is reason to revert the sale.
Woah, I was really considering a Nest (I use Hass.io for many things, lighting at sunset, reading energy meter and my home energy usage), I'm very glad I didn't purchase one yet.
One more reason to go for a completely-in-my-lan solution.
Not everything I'm running is open-source, but I made the same concession with Google in this case. Not using any other Google offering. Avoiding them by choice.
Nest products were the one exception. Previously owned several Nest Protect units and a thermostat. Moved, and installed a Nest thermostat and some temperature sensors. Just a couple of weeks ago, finished writing a data collection script to look at the temperatures in various rooms of the house. Mostly to have some real-world personal data to play with. Was hoping to write an Alfred workflow to change the temperature from my laptop.
Now I've lost those options, and in addition, I will have to have a Google account. (That is how the notice reads, right? You don't have to convert immediately, but you will have to convert eventually?)
Almost consider it my fault. I trusted Google in this one case after losing trust in Google in many other cases. “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”
Will probably start looking for alternatives. Hopefully the corporate machine is paying attention to this, and will realize that attempting to force users into your ecosystem will drive many of them to different ecosystems. But it will take time and effort to regain user trust.
Are there any good alternatives that let you self host a server send don't send your data to someone else? All I've found are some plans from Spark. It doesn't look too difficult to make, just wondering if there were any other kit projects out there.
EU law (because the EU seems to be the only one willing to make these big laws inconveniencing tech) - any IOT enabled product that has the IOT capabilities removed by closing of a service without a simple way for those capabilities to be re-enabled (simple being further clarified in law) can be returned for a full purchase refund up to 3 months after closing of the service.
IIRC there is a law where you can return items for a full refund or exchange if the product was "not fit for purpose", which includes shenanigans like these.
At least in the UK there are the concepts of "fit for purpose" (and of merchantable quality) and "reasonable expected life". Now I doubt there's yet been much chance to evolve what a reasonable life of a smart thermostat or associated devices are, but crucially liability is with the retailer. It's on them to prove they are not liable. If they then want to chase the manufacturer, that's separate. It probably pays not to buy direct from manufacturer.
A retailer can be busy ducking all their legal obligations and telling you that you're long past the window of refund, but mention the provisions of the Sale of Goods Act and you usually get a very different response, or a manager is called over (to authorise the inevitable refund). The Sale of Goods Act is still law (Well, parts of it), and the newer EU Consumer Rights Act is in force as well. Good job too, the Sale of Goods Act is stronger in several areas, whilst the EU gave us 2 year warranty.
There is case law where things have been judged to be within reasonable expected life, and a repair, refund or compensation ordered long after the mandatory warranty ran out.
The UK has the "fit for purpose" clause in the Distance Selling Act and I think you can return the product at any time. I'd highly encourage anyone who is inconvenienced by this to exercise such laws.
You still have to strip your thermostats off the wall. The best is still to not buy any device that is meant to last more than 5y that relies on a service.
how about something like - if the product needs to be uninstalled to be returned the company needs to provide for uninstalling the product from the purchasers location and shipped back to the company, with full payment of shipment and uninstallation provided by the company.
There are a lot of people who are going to own nest devices that they had professionally installed, as many of these purchases push for using an on-site technician service to install for you (try buying any of the smart thermostats on Amazon, they all have an option for professional installation).
I'm sure I'm missing something, but in the past when I've replaced thermostats it's pretty easy. Easy to find a replacement and easy to do the work. I know that everyone has different levels of skill here but this is less involved than, say, replacing an outlet.
A replacement compatible with the heating that may have been installed 10 years ago by a company that went out of business and from a manufacturer that also went out of business.
Some of the EU customer protections are really top notch. God knows we can't just trust the tech companies to not be manipulative pieces of shit. "Don't be evil" - my ass.
sorry, I thought I was clear in suggesting it as a law - although realistically in a lot of EU countries you could make the case and get it returned.
For example I'm in Denmark and we have a consumer ombudsmand were you can make complaints about violations of your rights as a consumer https://www.consumerombudsman.dk/about-us/ (it talks about marketing but I the Nest was marketed to have functionality it no longer has), in fact there may already be sort of an Ombudsmand ruling that pertains here https://www.consumerombudsman.dk/media/46530/2016-memorandum... which says you can return something after your normal right of return but you are liable for diminished value - so you would not get the full refund in this case but something.
Of course I think that an actual complaint on this subject would result in a memorandum that you can get your full refund.
Update - I had an opportunity to ask someone who definitely knows exactly what the rules are in Denmark and they said that if Google refused to refund you would have to take them to court but they are also certain that any eventual legal process would find Google liable for refunding as long as the Nest was ever marketed for its now no longer functioning capabilities.
The problem is you’ve voted with your dollar already. You’ve looked at the market and selected the one that meets your needs. Then the maker changes what you’ve purchased.
Yeah, it would end up hurting the upstarts, but the lack of this law hurts customers and hurts business on the long term because consumer trust evaporates.
Not aware of such a law but there's a related European IOT project: http://big-iot.eu
BIG IoT is a European project to enable IoT Ecosystems.
With our technologies, we enable cross- standard, cross-platform, and cross-domain IoT services and applications. We are embedded in the European IoT Platforms Initiative: https://iot-epi.eu
For those who see this as Google turning off an unused service: no, just no. This is Google cutting off a massive interop ecosystem to try to parlay the success of Nest into higher adoption of Google Home. That’s vastly different than shutting down G+, Wave, Orkut, Reader, etc.
It would be as if they announced tomorrow that the only way to read GMail is in Chrome browser or on an Android phone.
> For those who see this as Google turning off an unused service: no, just no. This is Google cutting off a massive interop ecosystem to try to parlay the success of Nest into higher adoption of Google Home. That’s vastly different than shutting down G+, Wave, Orkut, Reader, etc.
It's exactly the same as previous shutdowns, it's just that you didn't personally care about previous shutdowns and couldn't be arsed to emphasise or learn the lesson that google can not be trusted to keep services alive.
The sharp folks are those like ocdtrekkie upthread who shed their nest immediately upon learning of the acquisition.
Since you claim its exactly the same as previous shutdowns listed; when Google shut down Wave, which paid for Google product were they aiming to increase adoption of?
How? I guess you could use it like a chat room just putting new messages at the bottom of the document but seems like a crazy kludge to use Wave as a chat.
I thought that was its intended primary purpose. We could chat and inline media, pictures, etc. It was a big upgrade from IRC. There were issues with sharing files larger than just images and whatnot, but it easily could have been polished a bit into something better. If Discord added the ability to have 'threads', it would basically be what we used Wave for. For a few weeks anyway until Google decided it wasn't catching on enough or whatever justification they gave for giving up on it.
I don't think I ever heard of it being pitched that way just as a collaborative editing room for editing an actual document not just for using the comments etc as a chat.
It's a typical Asshole Executive move: leverage successful feature to increase adoption of random other product, and then convert adoption increase into bonus and career opportunities, and hope that the loss in goodwill isn't noticed.
It was the same when G+ was created. Asshole Executives started jamming + buttons everywhere, including search results (!). They killed + in search queries as meaning "required". Every semi-successful feature had to get G+ integration to maximize the adoption of G+.
Some times people say "What if $COMPANY goes evil?". But if Google couldn't make G+ successful, then them going evil shouldn't be too concerning. They're clearly not as powerful as one could think
It happens to me all the time. I used to use Gmail API to send mail (personal hobby app, to my own account). Every now and then Gmail would randomly refuse to authenticate through the API because of unsafe or suspicious access or some other BS. Then I would need to jump through some hoops (log in manually though browser, toggle on/off the "allow less secure app" setting, the disable unlock captcha setting, and it would work again for a while before acting up again.
I don't think depreciating the use of "Give your Google account password to $app" or "Give $app a fixed never expiring key that's as good as your password" unless you explicitly enable it is particularly user hostile.
If you used the Gmail API https://developers.google.com/gmail/api and client that supports OAuth instead of SMTP with username/password you wouldn't really run into this problem.
Yeah it kind of sucks for hobbyists because it's not as simple as sending an SMTP email but that's more to do with the lack of good tooling than something fundamental.
I used to be a fan of Google. They were the good ones, the open ones. Ha! I’ve feel like they played the long sucker game. How times have changed. Even Android feels like a ruse. And Chrome. And maps.
The last thing will be search. At some point it’ll be curated for my own good.
To be fair, Everyone has to make a living, but be honest don’t take people for suckers of make them into suckers.
It feels like Google search is already curated. At home I cannot find academic articles which appeared in the search at work, because my girlfriend trained the home's recommendation engine on searches for cute cat pictures and domestic things. In DuckDuckGo, at least I know I will be able to find the same results for the same search terms no matter where I am.
Wow, I agree. Lately I've noticed search sometimes just pops in websites just because I visited it from a previous search, relevancy be damned! and it suuuuuucks.
I seem to be able to find a much more limited selection of content than I used to in the past. It used to be that even obscure search queries turned up something useful, but now you either get nothing or the same old big or commercial sites. There has to be tons of content out there that Google just can't seem to find anymore.
Using Google via VPN services, there are many other users. Occasionally someone's been a jerk, and Google gives you the stinkeye. But then you switch to a different server.
I added "private VM" in case OP was sharing a machine with his girlfriend. But really, it's always prudent to use VPNs from dedicated VMs. Because that compartmentalizes tracking. And using VMs also simplifies managing machine state. You can use a fresh clone for each session, for example. Or boot from a static image.
I like DDG and StartPage, for sure. But sometimes I just gotta use Google.
Using !s will proxy through Startpage, so you get Google results through an actual search proxy instead of just going to Google (I don't think !g "un-bubbles" anything).
I recall thinking, a long time ago, "You never see ads for Google stuff on TV. That's because what they make is so much better they don't need to advertise them."
I think you can mark the spot where the business folk took the reins from the engineers by the date of their first TV ads.
I agree. I used to be a fan. They were explicitly not evil, gave lots of open source stuff away for free, made lots of other free services.
Turns out they were just making us dependent on them, and now that they've got us, they do whatever they want. We need to make ourselves less dependent on Google. Move away from GMail, use Firefox, DuckDuckGo, OSM, federated social networks, etc. I don't have a good replacement for Android yet, as iOS is just another walled garden. Similarly, Facebook is no replacement for Google+. We need stuff to be opener, not dependent on another company. For email, you need to own your own domain, so you can easily move from one provider to another.
god I tried. DuckDuckGo just does not work as well as it needs to. It gets touted as a turn key google search replacement but it’s simply not. 4 times today, I searched 5+ different ways for something after poor results, each thing took one search to find on google. Granted, maybe I am just more familiar with how to get the most out of googles search, maybe it has such a vast profile on me that it understands what I want i am looking for. Either way, i am pretty close to caving and it’s sad
You can use the !SP operator before your DDG search to invoke StartPage, which uses Google results. I mean, it's the same thing, just it doesn't look like you're using Google search ;)
LineageOS [0] is also worth a look, it's like Android without all the un-uninstallable Google spyware. No play services, no need to log in to a G account to use the device, no G apps (but you can install them separately if desired), no background data harvesting, etc.
The open source MicroG project [1] takes things a step further by acting as a drag-and-drop replacement for Google Play Services. It provides a FOSS location provider backend, allows the device passes SafetyNet checks (Snapchat/Pokemon Go/online banking), and generally makes for a seamless mobile experience.
I've been using both for ~6 months now and the only noticeable difference is GPS taking a few seconds longer to get a satellite lock. Definitely worth a shot if you're interested in de-googling your Android.
I guess not all search is profitable, perhaps there gradually "optimising" on financially profitable search, so only crawling sites that relates to content for users that bring then in money, only returning SERP items that bring in money? Obviously they need their search to be broadly useful too, but many searches probably have no financial benefit for them??
It can't be for lack of crawling - my little ad-free forum which hasn't seen more than a couple concurrent users for years is crawled daily by Googlebot.
What's the point of creating an ecosystem if you won't support it? Typical Google. I understand shutting down or refocusing services that don't work. But decisions like this or to shut down Inbox make no sense to me. It feels like complete disregard of the user base.
Google has done this again and again with their APIs and services other than their main search and advertising business. For me as a developer Google has a bad name now and I'd never invest my time developing something in their ecosystem or worse have my business depend on it. They do not care about their user base as is shown even when they shut down paid services. Which is why even with all their promises about Google Cloud I still don't trust it. When one says that about Google Cloud you get this immune response that it is different, but it is prefixed with Google which is a bad name when it comes to keeping third party services or APIs up paid or unpaid.
I've been a Google apologist for most of my HN career, but shutting down Inbox really changed my view. Regular old GMail sucks compared to Inbox, especially the mobile app. I miss the Inbox app and its layout and recognition of important emails so much that I don't feel like I can get attached to anything else they make.
I find it funny that pointing to this state of affairs in the comments of HN posts about new Google products attracts downvotes like nobody's business.
I think it's because that AdSense revenue is so sweet and so easy that nothing else is as interesting to the organization. Pretty difficult benchmark for competing products to show their value. It's like an oil rich nation investing in unrelated industries for which they have no history or pedigree in order to build a sustainable future.
There's also a well-documented culture within Google that it's an attractive resume-builder to launch new products, but nobody wants to maintain a product.
At some point there has to be a value in marketing for keeping people happy, right? At least mothball upgrades and leave this running "slowly" or _anything_ other than just shut everything down for reasons...
My daughter wrote a letter to a clothing manufacturer about how the embroidered lettering was falling apart on a brand name shirt. They sent her a new one, for free.
That is good marketing. What Google is doing? Slowly turning their brand into the "don't trust us with anything long term" brand.
No but Microsoft used to be untouchable too. They've come back a bit under Nadella who seems to understand why people use his product. I never thought I'd see the day where I trusted MS more than Google but wow has Google just become a scummy, unreliable company since Alphabet.
I've gone from considering MS outright evil to being unconcerned about being their customer.
While with Google I now find myself actively worrying about how to avoid their services before they break things I depend on. I certainly will not use any new services from Google... It feels like the world has turned upside down.
Just an aside I was never able to successfully register my gmail account to work with Inbox. Even with the invite there was something wrong I could never get past. Google does big things, but "making stuff work" just isn't one of them afaict.
So now all Nest accounts have to go through Google. Can’t wait for the first time some Android developer gets their Google account locked and suddenly can’t change the temperature on their HVAC unit.
Or that people using Gsuite wont be able to perform certain actions because ... reasons? My Google home hub is still pretty useless since they don't allow some features.
I created my app when I had a Nest thermostat and was working from home. The thermostat would assume that no-one was at home during the day - and so turn off the heating - as I didn't walk past it often enough, so the original purpose of the app was just to detect when I was actively using my PC, and ping the thermostat not to go into "Away" mode.
It was then really rewarding to add more features and make the app available for others to use. I got some lovely feedback and sensible feature requests via email, and one user generously did a French translation of the UI. I even got a small number of $€£s in Paypal donations!
However. I no longer have a Nest thermostat (moved to Australia, where they're not available), no longer work from home, and now have a young son. So I have to admit that prioritising the time & finding the motivation to rework the app to work against a different set of APIs (if even possible) may be hard to come by.
What are you playing devils advocate against? OP wasn't saying it was a bad business decision by google, he was just saying it sucks for the 1800 people using his thing.
Are you saying those 1800 people can't be upset about the lost functionality because they don't effect Google's bottom line?
I don't understand how your comment follows from the GP
Developer hours going towards enriching the ecosystem at no cost to Google are gold. They’ve now alienated this dev, and produced yet another cautionary tale for anyone thinking about relying on Google.
Because having an open API fosters a community of applications that is free marketing and free development for your product.
Nest products are expensive, those 1800 users may equate to a few hundred thousand in revenue for Google, who may instead buy a competitor for their next purchase.
We don’t know the value that’s being lost since we are talking about potential in early days. 1800 can go to 180,000 in a short time. We don’t know where Twitter would be if they hadn’t tanked their client ecosystem. We don’t know where Wave would be.
1800 is big number. When you piss off these many people, they talk, they let their friends know, they tweet. It's a world of instant information that spreads like wild fire. You are easily talking about turning away 18000 or even million users depending on who picks up their frustration. You are one journalist away from disaster. So if you got to piss off these many people, you better have real good reason and be able to explain it convincingly. You show empathy. You have path for switch. You give enough of notice. I see none of that in Google's blog post. Absolutely none. They have hired people who simply don't care or perhaps are so dumb that they don't even know the damage they are doing. Next time when Google guy show up at interview, make sure to ask him/her big decisions he/she made about product shutdowns and how they executed on them.
Because they're still users, and that's only for this app; there are a lot more Nest users than that. How Google treats them is a sign of how they may treat other users in the future. If Google make it a habit to screw users, users will not trust Google in the future. Losing the trust of your users is more expensive than some companies seem to realise.
What exactly qualifies as a user? Are API users individual accounts making transactions? Are they companies that have registered with Google to use the Works with Nest API?
If it's 1800 individual hobbyists I get it, but if we're talking about 1800 small and medium businesses that have to find a different way to support their customer base that's a huge problem.
If I'm a technologist or developer, I would be less enthusiastic about suggesting or implementing other Google technologies due to the poor form they continue to show in developer relations.
Google is poisoning their brand to the people who control the spend and make technology decisions. While Ballmer's "Developers, developers, developers" delivery on stage was painful, he was right, and Nadella at Microsoft gets it.
I would not recommend any Google products, including Google Cloud, to anyone.
Hrm. How so? HomeKit does not allow third party devs to write apps to control HomeKit devices, AFAICT. So they never added the capability that Google is removing. People can still develop devices that are triggered by Nest and Google Home. They just can no longer write apps that themselves trigger or modify Nest devices.
Or are you saying it's prescient because Apple saw that such capabilities were not economically viable in the long run, and so it was prescient of them to never develop the functionality in the first place?
HomeKit doesn't require an internet connection for smart home devices to work, it doesn't require you to use the smart home maker's garbage apps or sign up for accounts with them, it gives away for free features that smart home makers try to put behind subscription paywalls, and most importantly it was designed to be secure.
I haven’t tested this, but I believe you could use Homebridge to create a virtual “button” that got “pushed” when you hit some API endpoint, then configure HomeKit to change something when the button gets pressed.
Can you show an example of HomeBridge controlling an HomeKit accessory? The description of the project says the opposite: it allows the control of non-HomeKit accessories from HomeKit.
That is not true. The HomeKit protocol is documented. There are at least a few open source projects that implement it both as accessories and hubs. Home Bridge being the best known one.
If all the accessory vendors were to go under and Apple were to stop supporting HomeKit tomorrow, HomeKit accessories and hubs would still operate just fine and alternatives could be created. Even using Alexa or Google Nest for voice control.
Being documented is not enough. Implementing a commercial device requires including an Authentication component (before it used to be an actual chip, now it seems it can be done in software), and that can be used to prevent devices from speaking to alternative control apps.
From what I can tell, Homebridge implements Homekit as a device, receiving commands. But can anyone build an app or device to send commands, outside of iOS?
The fact that I can't find an Homekit control app for Android strongly indicates this is not possible.
> Being fully documented means anything can work in any way.
A protocol being fully documented does not mean you can get a device you cannot control (like an Homekit lightbulb) to connect to your server instead of the manufacturer's. If requests are signed and/or encrypted, knowing the protocol won't help if you don't have the keys. See also Tivoization.
> For example, search the web for ‘homebridge alexa’
I had found it. I don't think you realize that there's no Homekit there at all.
The point of Homebridge is to translate from a Homekit-speaking control app/assistant to a non-Homekit-enabled device:
But when you use homebridge-alexa, you're replacing that first link with another protocol (specifically, MQTT+JSON, which is what it uses to connect to https://www.homebridge.ca/).
So you've actually removed all Homekit parts from your smart home system!
I have Wemo smart plugs that I have plugged in all sorts of stuff like Heater, Lamps, and TV, etc connected to my Google Home and Home Mini. And I'd advise anyone to think twice before buying smart plugs or smart devices. There are so many bugs creating so many complications that I feel they are not worth using. You'd need to reconnect them with WEMO app time and again, restart these frequently if they just stop working and even you would not know what to do with them when a failed firmware upgrade will make your smart plug useless!
I have also voted with my money for IKEA Trådfri and am quite happy with it. Light bulbs, motion sensors, remote controls. Everything connected to zigbee coordinator and controlled with simple node red flows. And good thing is that list of supported devices is longer than any other single vendor with option to expand it by your self.
Baby starts moving in bedroom, light bulb flashes in kitchen.
Sonos stopped supporting remote control, no problem, map IKEA remote controller to start/stop Sonos playback.
i’m also pretty happy with my ikea trådfri bulbs and outlets. works with homekit via the trådfri hub (which i got for half price in the as-is section) so i can create scenes and automations easily. it’s still early and limited, and new features are slow to come by, but i’m not trying to do anything fancy yet anyway.
All I can say is if like me you'd bought Energenie MiHomes, you'd have spent half as much working out that you need to think twice becase there are so many bugs that make them not worth using... I seldom hear success stories from us early adopters with smarthome things.
I also have two Nests. Stringify has now shut down (and was buggy/difficult to use), and IFTTT is now losing access to Nest it seems, so I guess that's a real knockback of at least several years for smarthome.
Even when it was all in theory working, the most simple thing was not actually possible - Nest shows you humidity, so when humidity is over 60%, turn on the dehumidifier (I have one upstairs, one downstairs). Such a simple task coudln't be achieved because of about individual problems, and this to me puts the date of solving it back quite a way.
If I'm reading this right, the Wemo plugs should still work? The part of the program that's ending is that Nest devices can no longer be controlled by third party apps. Devices that are controlled by Nest should still be controlled by Nest. At least, unless I have vastly misunderstood the FAQ?
I bought a WeMo plug and was quite shocked to discover that there is no form of security or authentication. Anyone using the same network that your WeMo devices are using can control them using the WeMo mobile app and crucially keep controlling them once they have left your network via the Belkin cloud. They are effectively proving an open door to your network that requires you to trust Belkin to keep secure.
Edit: They do support UPnP, but still they are wide open to attack.
There are many wonderful devices from China that have hackable APIs that don't need to phone home to Google to work. They're also much cheaper and more OSS friendly.
With those devices. Don’t get me wrong, I love AliExpress - but I’d be worried about anything running at mains voltage, especially when I’m away from home.
I have lost all hope that it will ever be otherwise. It's quite straightforward to build smart home devices for youself that are reliable and don't depend on the whims of some cloud or firmware vendor, but the minute you try to form a company that sells them you'll be required to generate a continuing revenue stream which means shitting on your customers in one way or the other.
Is this true? I’ve used open source printers from Lulzbot and others, and I haven’t had this experience. I think the moral of the story is to not put stuff on some closed platform in the cloud, not that you shouldn’t use company-provided hardware.
I think his point was that it is hard to keep a company going making just the hardware. The margins are low, and customers only have to pay you once, to get the hardware.
It is hard to make a lasting business off that, which is why everyone wants to do subscription services.
It used to be the only way to make business in not so long past. People made money selling products just fine.
Maybe it's because people trying to get rich quick playing the VC lottery are sucking the oxygen out for people who want to just do a honest to God, "payment in exchange for providing value" type of business.
I honestly have give it quite a bit of thought as to what it would take to start an open source hardware company. Everything has a user accessable API and the option to use their own firmware if they want.
The more important thing than hack-ability is that the product is rock solid.
That implies stuff like "there is one way to do it", "95+% branch coverage in unit tests", and "100,000-1M hours of automated stress testing of real hardware before shipping a new board rev."
I see Google API/ecosystem fans often defending or dismissing Google’s pattern of behavior here, using arguments like this:
“Well, sure, they shut down that API I don’t use — big deal; all things come to an end eventually! But, they’d NEVER do that to this API I rely on — that would be so horrible, Google just would not do it!”
I hope we all can acknowledge that this argument is on perpetually eroding ground, at the very least.
I've been considering pasting this: https://killedbygoogle.com/ every time the argument comes up. Maybe Google proponents will make one for other companies notorious for killing services, but at least for now, the Google Graveyard grows.
Most annoying part is that they also disabled the annotations for old videos. So, watching an old video where it says "click here or there for this and that", without linking it in the description gets kind of annoying.
Annotations were also used to correct errors in educational videos after the videos were published. The errors are still there, but the corrections are gone. They replaced annotations with "cards" which are 100% spam.
E-mail is also often misused for spamming purposes, and Gmail -- which is easy to sign up for and trusted by mail servers worldwide -- is often used for scams. Should we expect it to be terminated as well?
Any solution that allows you to write stuff on the Interwebs can be misused for spam. The solution that every company is expected to come up with, of course, is a good anti-spam mechanism.
Youtube annotations were a solution offered for free. It probably didn't make any sense for Google to implement a good (and expensive) anti-spam mechanism for it. But let's call it for what it is -- a cost-cutting measure made at the expense of users, most of whom are non-paying. There's no point in bringing up technical matters, there aren't any.
If you found them annoying you could always disable them, I was rather fond of them, people did lots of cool stuff with them. Like choose you're own adventure videos, and 3kliksphilips CSGO skin showcase videos. I think they should have kept them. They kept bitching about them not working on mobile but that's only because they chose not to support mobile
They stopped selling it, once the stockpile run dry and the demand didn't warrant making another batch. Which was when I found a shop with them in stock and bought three. I believe they'll stay supported for a while.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but don't have insider knowledge on this.
When will Google stop updating Chromecast Audio? As we've seen with recent Chromebook mass-end of supporting, Google is happy to leave devices bought 18+ months ago in a vulnerable, insecure state even when it'd be easy to keep life support on (like delivering a secure browser to these perfectly fine laptops, or providing minimal security patches to embedded devices).
It seems like Google really can't handle long term support of anything that isn't wildly successful (200+ million users), and even for those things that hit said benchmark, long term support is bumpy, inconsistent and unpredictable.
The chromecast audio was a pretty cool device! Kind of a shame that they killed it off. I'm kind of being wary of google in general, they have a tendency to kill things I like :P
that site is a bit disingenuous -- it doesn't distinguish between projects that were merely upgraded/renamed/deprecated for good reason
for example, "secure google search" was "killed" but all this means is that instead of having to type "secure.google.com" to use encryption, google made HTTPS the default...
there are lots of legitimate examples so such exaggerations seem unneccessary
OK, but then that's different. Because you were complaining that they were not differentiating between actual killed services and things that naturally reached their end of life, but in this case, the site is actually wrong.
It clearly says that it provided provided users with anonymous search, which gives the impression of something like DuckDuckGo or Startpage. But that's not what's happening, and I think that's worse than your original complaint.
> Note that SSL search does not reduce the data that Google receives and logs when you search, or change the listing of these terms in your Web History
The page you linked to is for "Google Search over SSL" and is not the same thing.
Searches performed at encrypted.google.com (not just google.com with SSL) were not available in any user-facing capacity in one's Google account. It did not store the search queries in user-facing history, and did not use those terms for future search suggestions.
Pasting the same thing over and over in different threads regardless of context isn't exactly arguing in good faith or inviting nuanced discussion, so I wouldn't go that route myself...
GE may have stopped making a radio your parents bought in 1948, but it's perfectly possible it still works. How many perfectly functional devices have GE bricked simply because they were bored of supporting them? MS Windows drivers support just about every ancient crusty device MS ever made - apparently forever.
It's the web obsession with having every trivial action go through an online server - for data gathering - that breaks the consumer's implied contract with hardware devices: That they should simply work until physically beyond economic repair.
Most of those simple web API actions could function just as well on the LAN, so the device could function indefinitely - you'd just lose remote access when the Google API server shuttered. The 99% case of controlling lights or thermostat whilst in the home would still work, just no longer remotely from a hotel 1,000 miles away.
I can think of some pretty big Microsoft pivots, and I don't begrudge them their choices at all.
But it's curious that you only hear cries of outrage when Google kills products, not when other companies do it.
Why do you think that is?
------
Media Center
Kinect
Zune
PlaysForSure DRM
Microsoft Money
Windows Home Server
Microsoft Kin Phone
Microsoft Mobile, previously known as Nokia
Windows 10 Mobile
The Band
TechNet
Hotmail
Live Messenger
Live Mesh
Groove Music Pass
Groove Music for iOS
Groove Music for Android
Encarta
Windows Small Business Server
Flight Simulator
Microsoft Works
Microsoft FrontPage
Windows Embedded Automotive, formerly Microsoft Auto, formerly Windows CE for Automotive, formerly Windows Automotive, formerly Windows Mobile for Automotive
I think that's because no one is suggesting that things shouldn't ever come to end of life. Ford stopped making the Model T.
If you already bought them, Microsoft Money, Encarta, Flight Sim, SBS, Works etc etc should all keep working. If you still have the CD you can probably install just fine, and keep on using them (if it's still meaningful). I'm sure plenty do just that, and perhaps some will for decades. Just no more new versions are coming. Sure MSN Messenger and other online offerings have been hard stopped.
For most of your list, no one hit what's effectively a remote kill switch, and stopped them working for everyone at the same moment. That's what killing an API does for an internet service, or hardware device dependent on that service. On such and such date $thing will cease working. Google does that all the time, hardware and software. So much that they got themselves a reputation for it.
Didn't wear out, die of old age, become obsolete, but they reached out and killed. It's qualitatively different.
Are you including all products that work, but no longer receive updates?
Because yes, MS-DOS 1-6 ate no longer supported, windows 1.0-3.11, qbasic,...
All those would still work btw. You just wouldn't get updates / newer versions of them.
But if you're talking about services that rely on online servers it seems different. And these are services that no longer work once the plug is pulled.
For MS the list I can pull from memory is far shorter. In fact, i only remember Zune. I bet i missed several, but more than Google?
Microsoft hasn't killed many online services, and besides Azure doesn't have dominant control of the internet like Google does. MS kills support for old box products and hardware devices, but that doesn't mean you can't still use them! (Also, what would we even kill? Bing? MSN?)
When Google pulls the plug on Nest, they burn an entire ecosystem, and piss off the people they should be working with on IoT. It's really stupid strategy.
I gotta say, I would never develop anything on Google because I would worry I end up with some little niche business that brings a little extra for my efforts and then they'll kill it. It's an added risk.
Microsoft was founded in 1975, and GE was founded in 1892 (!), to Google's 1998, but there are likely angles that would make it interesting. Number killed/number alive? Number killed since y2k? etc
Well for sure, when it comes to developer exposure.
This point was about “enterprise” software in general and the fact that many a project has been abandoned and put down in this space without much fanfare.
Also, many big companies tend to pay a lot of money for software the never actually use, hence “cushy”.
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. Plenty of companies do that, sure, but Microsoft has always been a very, very aggressive mass-market player. Their software is used in enterprise, sure, but it’s by almost every enterprise, not just isolated niches.
They’re competitive on prices too (although it’s tough when many of your direct competitors are free). Compare MS Office with something like Maya or AutoCAD, say.
Many angry devs have sat in their cubicle swearing at MS & others product teams for changes made or products dropped.
These products doesn’t necessarily have the visibility of google services.
What I’m further trying to say is that it’s a culture thing.
Times are changing and with it the business model of selling standardized crap to clueless, ignorant customers.
How quick this change comes for a company is dependent mostly on the inertia of it’s customer base i guess.
Businesses are starting realize that you need to take back control of data and process to increase opportunities for innovation as well as speedy delivery.
This culture has in ways been pioneered by for example google and others selling/providing services rather than software suites.
They have constant change as an inherent property of their organization and this leaks.
This is ofc just my take on it.
(Digression regarding prices: maya and cad are business drivers. You need to compare them to SAP or possibly the bizdev stuff from MS == not cheap)
There’s probably room for us both to be right, as MS is such a massive company with zillions of products.
I’m coming at it mostly as a client-side developer, comparing to platforms like macOS, iOS and Android (and the web!) where things are constantly in flux, with new APIs added and old ones deprecated.
Compared to those, Windows and .NET are extremely stable; they add new APIs, sure, but old ones tend to stick around and keep working for a long time (some would argue too long).
That’s not to say I like Microsoft platforms and APIs; they tend to be badly-designed, buggy and fragmented. But in my experience at least, old MS APIs keep on working whereas old Google APIs get deprecated and shut down. It’s a very different developer experience, with different upsides and downsides.
Sounds reasonable. There’s many perspectives to be had and I appreciate yours.
I’ve spent far too much time in the “enterprise” spectrum of this business and arguably this is were MS for example have made the bulk of it’s fortune.
The flux you mention could for many be a “good thing” assuming you can keep pace?
I don't quite get what people expect... do they think that once google creates something, they are obligated to continue it indefinitely? That seems like an unreasonable expectation.
We expect web services to go away eventually. We expect physical products to keep working until they physically break. The problem is when companies sell physical products with a web service as a fundamental part of the product. Companies want to treat the web service like any other web service, while their customers reasonably expect their physical product to act like any other physical product.
Edit: I want to add that this is a really easy problem to solve. Support or create an open standard for the communication between the device and the server. Allow the device to be reconfigured to communicate with other servers. Then you can shut down your service and owners can keep on going. Better yet, make it so that our device can communicate on the LAN without needing a server at all. These problems exist not because they’re some inevitable fact of life, but because these companies see more value in not fixing them.
There is no other API to switch to, as Google controls the protocol, no open standard exists to replicate the Nest API server, and Nest devices don’t support targeting a self hosted API.
If you as a user or third party provider integrated with this API and rely on it for functionality, you have no alternative nor recourse.
Isn't "Works with Google Assistant" supposed to become the replacement API? It seems like they don't offer direct access to the data or the device but plan to allow "some" level of control?
(I don't know the space, apologize if my questions are naive...)
> As a Works with Nest developer and partner, you will not be able to access or control Nest devices once the Works with Nest APIs are turned off on August 31, 2019. Moving forward, our team will focus on making Works with Google Assistant the most helpful and intelligent ecosystem for the home, enabling all of the products in your users’ homes to work together.
We encourage all smart home developers to visit the Actions on Google Smart Home developer site to learn how to integrate your devices or services with the Google Assistant.
Part of the issue here is that many IoT products use web services as part of functions that don't need them at all. The cynic within me suggests that this is an intentional choice to allow for enforced obsolescence.
Beyond this, apps can be updated to remove or decrease support for older devices, and here our focus on trying to insist on auto-updated apps to fix security problems, or on apps that are designed to receive server-side updates, causes significant problems.
At some point, for example, I'm going to have to stop using the Philips Hue app, because I have an older Hue bridge. Support for the older bridge was at some point removed from the main app (and accompanied by an advertisement for the newer bridge), and moved to a legacy one, which seems to have a significantly slower response time. Now the legacy app has popups noting that web services will no longer support older hubs, and other services will be degraded... along with advertisements for the newer hubs. I expect at some point the app will simply be intentionally broken, entirely.
Fortunately, in this case, I can just use other apps, and other systems entirely, if need be, and at least the older hardware supports entirely local APIs (unless Philips decides to push a firmware update to break them?). I'm certainly not going to replace hardware that works with new hardware that provides no benefits, and throw away the old hardware; this would make no sense.
I haven’t found that at all. Why don’t you explain, because I’m curious which non-western non-capitalist system prevents IoT devices from becoming worthless without warning when the vendor ceases support or fails altogether.
> this is a really easy problem to solve. Support or create an open standard...
We call it the tech industry but 90% of it is actually politics. Big money influences things the most but everyone basically looks out for their own interest, right down to programmers shilling their favourite language/framework. Thats what makes this a difficult problem.
I think that many people naturally expect Google to work like a lot of other companies, which are focused on satisfying individual customers.
Google, though, is unusual that most of their users are not Google customers. They are the product. So Google's relationship to most individuals is statistical, not personal. If they care about me as an individual, I have never seen the slightest sign of it.
I also think that a lot of things at Google get started and killed not on the business merits, but due to shifting internal politics. Most of my Google friends have left, so I don't have recent examples, but from what I hear Google Plus is a fine example of something launched because a powerful executive got excited. As the political winds shifted, though, it got neglected, and then eventually killed.
Another interesting example for me is Google Reader. I liked the product, but was never clear to me why they built it. They ignored it for a long time and then shot it in the head. Giving it away crushed the market for commercial RSS readers. Once they stopped, that market came back, proving that Google could have had a successful commercial product if they had bothered to run it like a real business.
So no, I don't think we expect them to continue all things indefinitely. But I would love to see a more clear logic for what they will continue to support, because from my perspective it's erratic. I would be very unlikely to build a company that depended on Google; despite having used them for 20 years, I still don't think I can predict their business strategy. In contrast, I've been using Amazon for a similar period, and I have a pretty good idea of what they'll do. I'm not worried they'll EOL the AWS services I use, for example.
Some countries have laws which require devices to be fit-for-purposes that were advertised prior to sale. If consumers purchased a product based on claims made by Google, and those claims are not true, will regulators get involved?
> The basic question is whether the act or practice is likely to affect the consumer's conduct or decision with regard to a product or service. If so, the practice is material ... because consumers are likely to have chosen differently but for the deception ... the Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer's detriment.
My girlfriend recently bought a sleep tracker device, from the store, new with shrink wrap, only to take it home and find out the service required to operate it had already shut down.
I've been seeing things like this in TJ Maxx lately.
I don't know if anyone at TJ Maxx even understands that these are not items they can sell, as they don't work anymore. I think they think they're just fancy watches.
Every major company has company wide inventory. They have specialist buyers for different departments.
They either know, or have purposefully arranged things so the people who know enough aren't burdened with knowing everything. Neither is acceptable.
They could be idiots who don't know what they're doing, but then they wouldn't still be in business.
I returned cheap electronics to a UK store recently, it was very clear the entire batch didn't work, indeed it was probably why they were on offer. People will say "oh it was only a couple of quid, won't bother taking it back". Still on sale. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't reshelved the non-working ones I returned.
The thermostat I grew up with was retired (voluntarily—it still worked) when it was ~40 years old. If the thermostat manufacturer had somehow actively broken all the light switches, lamps, etc. in my parents’ house, even 40 years after the purchase of the thermostat, they would have been criminally liable.
Safety-critical() physical infrastructure is different than internet services. Applying laws for one to the other makes no sense.
() remember when all the Nests’ batteries died at the same time one winter?
I expect a "smart hub" to interoperate with a broad variety of devices. I expect existing banner features to not be revoked over petty turf wars. Google just made themselves irrelevant in yet another market.
Maybe they could develop an AI that predicts when Google services will get shut down so that users can make sounds decisions about how much to invest in them. Maybe it could even predict its own demise...
Google kills off products and services with wanton caprice and a complete disconnect from the needs of their users. While all services end, Google is liable to pull the rug out from under you at any moment. This is even more egregious if they kill off anything that physical devices use, as they basically just reaches out and broke a product you bought in good faith.
Alternatively, given that you already know that they won't reliably keep those services available indefinitely, you could consider this incentive as a consumer.
Do we want to let the low morals of companies hamper technological development?
Perhaps there's a legislative solution. Although in the UK the Consumer Rights Act has no time-limit, so in theory of your thermostat stops working because the company decided to pull the plug then you can get refunded, at least.
It's hard for me to buy into the idea that allowing a company to launch a product with a given feature hampers technological development. Requiring that a company runs an API forever if a product depends on it (and commit to refunds if that doesn't work out) seems like it would raise the barrier of entry to release such products, thus resulting in fewer products in this space (especially from smaller companies). That sounds like it would hamper technological development to me.
The product could be "a thermostat that works until 2021" though, then companies wouldn't be hamstrung with supporting old devices beyond the promises they'd made? Like giving a warranty, or making a parts/repair promise.
I'd like to see something like a requirement to publish interoperability details, or code that runs on a major OS that operates as a server, to facilitate long term user-led support, too.
Laying all my cards on the table I'm kind of ideologically opposed to a 300 million person government forcing any regulations whatsoever upon the entire population rather than allowing for local control of laws, but if I were to put myself in the shoes of someone who accepted the basic premises of American society I would see your proposed minimum EOL statement as a totally reasonable consumer protection rule with relatively little burden on the seller. This isn't what I took the other posters in this thread to be proposing, though, and I still think it would have a slight hampering effect on technological innovation (going back to GGP's argument)[0], I can just see arguing that this would be worth the consumer protection provided.
The requirement to publish interoperabilty-details/code/etc. is something I see as far more burdensome, perhaps in some cases to the point of being impractical, which is sad because I actually value these properties quite highly. I don't own any products that rely on the API of a specific company to continue functioning, and as an individual consumer I reward companies that do release such details (albeit in a statistically insignificant way). The simple, obvious reason that this is burdensome is because the release of code helps competitors, and requiring a company to help competitors makes it more likely that they will decide to invest in some less-regulated industry instead. There's a logical reason that most software companies aren't open-sourcing their products, unfortunately. Also, and I disagree with this yet don't want to force my opinions of the world on other peoples' infosec decisions, some people argue that closed source software is more secure than open source software due to security through obscurity. More rarely, I can imagine edge-case IoT devices that rely on highly specific infrastructure where interoperability just isn't reasonable, and the question of which layer interoperability should be provided on is non-obvious. Imagine if SpaceX launched a swarm of satellites measuring some data about the Martian atmosphere and released a product that could tell you the measurements when asked. Do they need to provide the details of the API between the product and the Earth-based relay? Do they need to provide the details of the connection between the Earth-based relay and the Martian satellite swarm? Do they need to provide the details of the internals of the satellites themselves? What if they're the only company anywhere near being able to supply this service, and the technology will almost certainly be obsolete by the time another company manages to launch a Martian satellite swarm? I feel like this probably isn't the best example, but there might be better examples I'm too dumb to think of at the moment, and not at least considering those known-unknown potential scenarios might be harmful to society as a whole (but I think I've articulated this last point worse than the rest of my comment, and I'm not entirely convinced of it myself).
[0]Edit: on further thought, this hampering effect should only really exist if there is a minimum time from date-of-sale that the minimum EOL must extend to; if I can meet the requirements while selling a product that is only guaranteed to work until yesterday then it shouldn't have any real effect other than consumer awareness, but it also kind of takes the teeth out of the proposal.
The fact that there is a Google Graveyard does not imply that someone thought that every service that Google creates should last indefinitely. I view it more as a useful reminder of how frequently Google does this - a good idea if you're about to make something Google does part of your workflow or habits.
There are also some products in there that were killed in a fashion that seemed capricious and difficult-to-explain in terms of popularity, usage and continued cost to Google - notably Reader and Code Search.
No company is, and expecting any company to continue spending money on maintaining a service even if they've decided it isn't profitable is pollyannaish.
To that end, I'm not sure I see the value in framing this specifically as a Google thing. Google is maybe the most visible because of how many products it has, and how popular many of them are. But really, this sort of thing is a problem that's inherent to any IoT devices that rely on proprietary cloud services, in whole or in part.
There's a difference between an IoT manufacturer going out of business, which causes related software services to terminate, and an IoT manufacturer failing to deliver on device claims made before the sale took place.
There's also a difference between how we want things to work, and how they actually do.
These services typically include some language in the EULA to the effect of, "We can disable parts of this device from our end, for any reason, at any time." And agreeing to those is almost certainly precondition for using the device.
Which absolutely sucks. But it's the legal and consumer protection environment we live in right now. Pretending it isn't is -- hang the downvotes, I'm gonna double down on this -- pollyannaish. Until things change, your only real recourse as a consumer is to refuse to buy products that are sold under those sorts of terms. Which, unfortunately, does mean steering clear of IoT devices that rely on proprietary cloud services.
I expect a company to continue a service for the foreseeable future (lets say the normal duration of the warranty on the product) if it is necessary to use a product i just bought. Otherwise I expect a refund or it feels very much like fraud to me. Legislators should get involved here sooner then later.
There is a huge difference between the product naturally breaking a while after the warranty expires, and the product deliberately self-destructing as soon as it's no longer the manufacturer's problem.
What a ridiculous website. Yes, the company that possibly writes more software than any other in the world has a lot of deprecated/dead software projects. Who would have thought? This would be more effective at making its point if it highlighted projects whose deprecation was particularly ungraceful/disruptive/careless, and explain how.
When compared to other online services companies Google closes down a huge amount of products that still have a large user base or viable alternatives. You only need to look at how many messenging apps they've come up with over the years to see that there is something wrong with the way they manage their products.
I'm a big user of Play music but can see the signs a mile off that it's being pushed into closing because of YouTube music, a service is straight up worse so I'll have to look around for alternatives.
No, actually, its YOU who hasn't understood the point of the website. The website aims to be a simple list of discontinued products. Now that you know what the point of the website is, you can decide for yourself if you want to visit it.
Also, people who take Google's side on this don't see the downside; they're probably already Google Assistant users. Now they're just getting the functionality they always wanted with a device (Looks like that Homekit integration isn't going to happen after all...).
Relying on APIs you can't control is always going to be risky. This is why open standards and open source are vital; when an API that you rely on gets abandoned, you want to be able to set up your own replacement API.
Anything less than that means you're relying on a temporary situation whose end you don't control and can't predict.
My understanding from an xoogler of how Google makes these large decisions to end services, is based on whether or not they can find a way to get the Google Ads product seamlessly integrated once the product is at a plateau in growth.
First they came for Google Wave, and I did not speak out—Because I never really understood what Wave was to begin with.
Then they came for Google+, and I did not speak out—Because almost all the people I want life updates from are on Facebook.
Then they came for Google Reader, and I did not speak out—Because I never actually heard of Reader until years after it was eliminated. Maybe Reader was actually first?
Then they came for Works with Nest, and I smugly said, "I told you so"—Because I always thought it was a bad idea to expose my thermostat to the internet.
Finally, they game for GMail—and I couldn't contact anyone who might speak out for me.
For select users that are willing to advocate for themselves against Google and are covered under a binding, unexpired contract Google will likely let them continue using said APIs. Everyone else is likely to see APIs break at Google's whim, as most users aren't covered by custom GSuite contracts.
I don't know. Seems like an easy way to force everyone on to the iOS Gmail app. People aren't going to change their email address because it doesn't work with the iOS mail app.
Good for you, that's the smart way to use e-mail. But most people, many of in tech and many of them knowing better, rely on GMail's web and mobile apps.
Also, unless you're using IMAP to sync the entire mailbox, you'd still lose. If your mail program only stores e.g. last 30 days of mail locally, and lets everything else live on the mailserver, then you'd only have 30 days worth of e-mails left.
Getting rid of say outlook support would greatly weaken Gmail.
Furthermore if you have an up to date sync on the day imap support ends then you have all your email and need face only changing over to a new address or if you already use a custom domain logging on and changing the email provider.
They make it really difficult to use your Gmail account with K9 Mail. You have to jump through a bunch of hoops and "critical security warnings" for attempting to sign in with a non-Google app.
Why? There are tons of perfectly good rss feed readers. I've never understood this one. I was a heavy Reader user, seamlessly switched to Feedly like the day after it was spun down, and never thought about it again.
Do you mostly consume text, or images/rich media? Something about Reader just worked for me. It was partly some blogs I followed and wanted to keep up with reading, but the meat of it for me was just scrolling endless pictures from various design blogs, that i'd sometimes star or label. Or some webcomic that I'd share with my handful of friends that were on there. Or I'd catch up whatever BMX or ski edits that came out. The interface was just clean for seamless and endless scrolling of all that media, (without titles and sources and headings taking up too much space), and the organization was clutch. Nothing else has caught my eye since. I've tried Feedly, old reader, and a few others, but none of them have me coming back for more, I just never got in the habit with them like i did for Reader.
Looking back, I guess it served as a kind of instagram/facebook feed, but for the internet that I wanted to see (which would differ from time to time, sometimes i want webcomics, sometimes I want ffffound <- this is largly something social media has yet to pick up on, the ebb and flow of what our attention wants). But no social media has captured my attention like Reader did...
Reader worked really well for me, too. And killing Reader seemed to send a signal to a lot of people that rss was 'done', whether rightly or wrongly - all that matters is that people believe it. I saw a lot less rss around subsequently. I switched to a few other services but ultimately just faded out on rss in general, which is a shame, as it was nice to have a non-algorithmic-curation feed of stuff I liked.
Isn't Feedly exactly for people like you? I never liked it because I mainly want text, but it always struck me as a reader for people who want pictures.
The really killer feature, to me and a lot of others, is that it let you discover, and communicate with, people that also liked the same feed entries. I had, entirely without planning, accumulated a nice little group of people with which I shared anything and everything I read via RSS.
I use Feedly now too but I still miss my Reader band.
I really recommend checking out Inoreader. It's a nearly perfect Google Reader clone, but with more powerful features like multiple filters per feed and subscribing to Twitter feeds.
Honestly, I think that IoT manufacturers should be required to provide open APIs. Preventing third-party developers from interfacing with smart devices, especially after they've already been sold to consumers, seems dangerously monopolistic.
To be clear: I want a legal requirement. Like any industry that has vastly expanded in power and societal influence, the tech industry may ultimately need to be regulated for the greater good.
> One developer platform. We want to unify our efforts around third-party connected home devices under a single developer platform – a one-stop shop for both our developers and our customers to build a more helpful home. To accomplish this, we’ll be winding down Works with Nest on August 31, 2019, and delivering a single unified experience through the Works with Google Assistant program.
> One set of privacy commitments. As Nest redefines technology in the home, there’s an opportunity to explain clearly and simply how our connected home devices and services work, and how we will respect your privacy. Learn more about Google’s commitment to privacy in the home.
and at least a preliminary perusal of the google home apps seems to indicate control of nest works:
so while grumpiness about this consolidation and need to migrate / have a google account (instead of nest account) seems warranted, this doesn't feel like the same thing as "pulling a twitter" or a conspiracy to bait and switch developers.
if it turns out you won't be able to actually control the nest in the same way, I'll go get my pitchfork and join y'all, but I'm cautiously waiting to see how this turns out.
Correct. If you had bought Windows Phone, it still works today. It's unbelievable that they have kept the whole thing running for may be 10,000 people out there.
But generally speaking I don't disagree with your assessment. It's just that media for hire was never really their strong suit and the Zune was a bit of a joke.
Where they must have suffered a world of pain is to keep old software compatible on newer Windows versions and I actually appreciate that.
Spoken like someone who never owned one. The hardware (built by Toshiba) was excellent as was the software - if you avoided the harebrained DRM scheme and loaded your own MP3s.
You may recall that this completely idiotic DRM implementation allowed to beam a DRMd song up to 3 times to other Zune users. That process was called squirting.
One /. commenter suggested that one should imagine Steve Balmer in the process of squirting.
EEE was a strategy for destroying standards through proprietary extensions:
> Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
They didn't shut down services, they'd make previous market leaders irrelevant & alternate implementations difficult to impossible (as they couldn't keep up).
Their attitude here would have been to not buy Nest but ship devices reimplementing the Works-With-Nest protocol, then add convenient / useful new features to the protocol in ways difficult for Nest to implement, and finally manage to lock it down such that Nest simply wouldn't be able to use the extensions while retaining compatibility with WwN devices themselves.
I should really move away Fromm google Calendar! I keep wanting to do it and never get around to it. It’s highly doubtful they’ll kill calendar (GSuite) but I also know they’ll find a way to.
I bought two Nest thermostats this winter because they worked with only R-W wires. I turned off the learning feature, as it was useless for my house with its combination of passive solar and radiant heat. However, the API is/was quite simple and I was looking forward to writing my own controller.
Still, I had this nagging feeling that I shouldn’t have bought them. Thanks for confirming my anxieties, Google! I can’t trust you, but I at least can trust you to be you.
> I bought two Nest thermostats this winter because they worked with only R-W wires.
FWIW, I've got a gas fireplace with no C wire that I added a 120V->24V AC adapter and a Fast-STAT common maker to for <$100 to wire my Ecobee thermostat without needing to alter any in-wall wiring.
What's the suggested alternate device and route for those of us that like a little control, like having other services that can integrate, and don't want to be yanked around by shutdowns?
EcoBee is what I bought when the writing was on the wall with Nest. Works with HomeKit, so EcoBee could go under tomorrow and Apple stuff can still talk to it. Or if an open solution is more to your liking, works with Home Assistant, too, though it goes through the API to work.
I have an ecobee, it seems to work pretty well, and has definitely saved us money on heating and cooling costs since we bought it.
As for automation and APIs to control it, generally we only use the Android app, but we have linked the ecobee to the Google Home app. I haven't yet tried to add it to the Mozilla webthings server running on our Retropie. We only have a 2 bedroom apartment, so our scope for lots of automation is somewhat less than if we owned our own home.
While they are not civil lawsuits, EU's anti-competition fines certainly can make a dent in any company's profits since they are based on a percentage of global turnover.
Hey, so how do I graph the temperature of my house at each temperature sensor over time?
I knew how to do that with the Nest API (see e.g. https://github.com/peterot/nest-graph or https://github.com/nbrownus/nestflux ). These data provide some useful information about energy expenditure in the house, a little better than the Nest "schedule" view of daily heating/cooling activity and daily temperature settings.
Will this still be possible with the new indirect Google Assistant API integration they are describing? How?
Lots of little tiny cheap ESP8266 based systems with DS18S20 temp sensors all over your house, telling you far more than just a single Nest thermostat could tell you.
Look into low power sleep modes, so that it can run for a very long time, waking up at some interval to take a quick temperature measurement, report it, then go back to sleep. While you're at it, have it confirm its battery level and report that too if the battery is low.
Does any attorney want to speculate whether Google could be forced to accept returns on Nest devices now that they’re materially worse through intentional actions?
It's interesting to see the responses to this article and contrast with the responses to the article regarding Facebook's possible 5B fine. I don't know the motivation behind this decision but I can't help but see the two sides of the same coin.
If we decide as a society that third-party apps misusing the platform in a way that hurts the users or otherwise looks bad to the outside world is the platform's fault, even if this was done with the user's consent (which the app that harvested data for Cambridge Analytica had) and furthermore decide that such conduct deserves a disproportionate fine (which 5B is, given that much larger breaches without any consent have generally gone unpunished) because the platform as a whole is owned by a large successful company, we cannot also expect large tech companies to keep supporting open platforms that allow third-parties to thrive. The economic benefits of giving control to the user are fairly marginal and theoretical, while the risks are extremely large and potentially existential.
I'm not intimately familiar with this particular API, but it's almost certain that it can be abused by third party apps in a way that makes look Google bad. Platform openness has its advocates and detractors at every company. In light of what's going on, it would be hard for the advocates to win any argument.
which the app that harvested data for Cambridge Analytica had
This is just part of the picture and almost revisionist in its briefness.
Sure, they had "permission" from the user, which took that "personality-test" to harvest their data.
Who sure as shit did not agree to have their data harvested were the friends of those who took the test and whoms data was harvested and resold with applomb and abandon.
Leaving this part out of your statement makes this statement a lie by omission.
Also I fail to see any actual privacy-related consequences of the Cambridge Analytica scandal - there's some fear-mongering over some targeted ads seen by some people but that is not a privacy breach nor a scandal. They broke TOS for Facebook API, but outside of that, what they eventually did with the data wasn't out of the ordinary. In other words, there may be concerns with the source data, but the source data was merely used to compute what is ordinarily considered non-sensitive information: a list to target given some political ad campaigns. Every single campaign does the latter, whether through email or direct mail. Hypothetically, if Zynga did this with Facebook API - to better target future potential customers, how much outrage would there be? Privacy-wise, it's exactly the same.
Marketers at nearly all large companies routinely do much worse with sensitive information. What personal information anyone cares about was used in a bad way here? Hypothetically, if there was an ad-platform that allowed you to specifically run targeted ad campaigns political opinions/leanings/etc as computed by the platform, this would not be an issue per se by the norms of the ad industry. It appears to me that what most people are upset about it has more to do: 1) how targeted advertising normally works and 2) that the political campaign of someone they don't want as president was helped by this. But targeted advertising is absolutely not illegal or anything and politicians you don't like still get to run campaigns. The actual amount of wrong-doing here is miniscule and the part that is attributable to Facebook is even smaller.
And the point is that any of this could absolutely happen with Nest. Nest does involve sensitive information and for instance, Nest cams don't have consent from every single person they happen to record either. I don't know exactly what nest API allowed apps to do but it would be hard to imagine that there's no possibility of scandal.
Well if your friend has access to your information, your friend can give that information to a third-party. That's how anything normally works. I didn't explicitly grant my friends or anyone permission to give my information to some specific browser my friend may be using, yet if I explicitly share information with my friend on any social media website, and the friend uses that browser, the browser will get that information. Same with plugins - could I create a website and say, you know what I explicitly do not give permission to the ad blockers to access my information. I can't - that's not how information works - if I give you access, you can give that access to any software you want. Again, this is how anything at all works and certainly with Nest.
The thing is, that's clearly not what most people actually object to about Cambridge Analytica. I mean, the same is even more true of Obama's 2012 campaign, which went so far as to harvest their supporters' friends' posting activity to assess how best to get those friends to vote Obama, and yet nearly all of the people who loudly decried Cambridge Analytica used this same bogus consent argument to justify why the Obama campaign's actions were OK.
If a developer has gone to the effort to integrate their solution with Nest, I'd be very surprised if they don't get their solution integrated with Google Assistant, and Apple HomeKit too while they're at it. So I assume that when end-users switch over their Nest devices to the Google Assistant platform, their existing Nest integrations will be available on the Google Assistant platform too. Doesn't appear to be as doom and gloom as most other commenters here are predicting.
The FAQ seems to say that isn't the case... the google system does not provide any API to actually control the nest devices, or at least not directly, which is likely required for a lot of the functionality third parties provided.
So... The functionality exists and is currently in testing, it's only just become stable enough that we're hearing about it, and they're notifying developers targeting the current service as far ahead of time as possible? I mean, it won't do anything for stuff that's too crappy to take software updates, but that's an entirely different matter.
Edit: Finally went and read the announcement. They're really not giving people much time, are they? Nevermind, three months is pretty bad.
No, this isn't a case of moving functionality from Nest to Google. They've removed the Nest API ("set the temperature", "set to away", "what's the temperature?"). They say "move to Google Assistant" but Google Assistant doesn't let you do that.
Also - I could sort of understand it if they provided a proper IFTTT style system in Google Home but they don't. All you can do is trigger actions based on a custom voice command or a time.
If you're even slightly surprised by this you weren't paying attention when Google bought the Revolv smart home ecosystem then took it out back and shot it. All the customers got when their expensive smart home devices shut down was a "Thanks for playing, here's a coupon for saving when you buy a Nest because we just turned off all your shit".
Google is a company with severe ADHD. Consumers expect home appliances to operate for decades. That is not a good mixture. If the whole "internet of things" trend dies out and people stop buying, you bet your ass Google will happily shut Nest's servers down and leave every single one of their customers out in the cold. They've already done it.
I've got friends with home automation systems from the early 80s. They work flawlessly. You think any service or device Google sells will be functioning in twenty years? Thirty?
I'll trust a smart outlet to cut my AC on for me. I'll even trust a wi-fi security camera aimed at my front yard. However, my corpse will be in the cold, cold ground before I hook a door or an oven up to the internet.
I doubt most new IoT will be functional in 5 years. They have an app mentality with everything locked up in that app. No API.
I look at a lot of products now and if I find I can't access it via python then I treat it as pre-landfill and don't even consider it worth purchasing.
Hardware as a service is the new normal. This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. "Smart" hardware means you're leasing it and will be changed at will or it gets bricked.
Hey, at least they are going to roll "Nest" accounts into "Google" accounts so hopefully the app can stop asking me to set up sms based 2fa everytime I try to change the temp.
All that employee stock from the acquisition must be finished vesting.
Yeah, I welcome this change. Nest's account management is garbage. It alerts me when a smoke alarm fires, but then it asks me to login, as if I have any idea what the password is.
Nest screwed the pooch with me before Google bought them by changing their UI and temporarily bricking my thermostat with unwanted firmware updates. (My Nest still works as a dumb thermostat but I'll never let it talk to the Internet again.)
When Google bought them I knew Nest would only get worse, and here we are.
Can't wait for them to tell me that Google Apps accounts aren't supported so I'll lose all access to my Nest devices... if that happens I'll be removing all of my Nest devices and selling my Google Home.
I'm SO SICK of them acting like there needs to be a firewall between google apps accounts and everything else.
Well, it was firstly advertised as free account with custom domain. I was one of many who created the account. and keep frustrating and maintaining another @gmail.com account for this reason.
That's not at all how it started. It started as a way to host your own domain for free and that's how they advertised and supported it. 10 years on they changed their mind but that's bullshit.
I was your guinea pig so you could perfect the service for business users, now that you're done with that experiment you want to hang us all out to dry.
I contacted one of their support guys, eventually I was put through to a senior agent. After I quoted a bunch of consumer laws (at least here in the UK) he was adamant that their terms of services lets them change features as they wish so legal action is definitely going to be the only way forward.
From the follow up email:
"Any product feature can be changed at Nests discretion under the terms terms of service. It is for this reason that I cannot refund the cost of your thermostat."
Just yesterday I started to look into building a tiny app that checks if the temperature in my two rooms that have a Nest is too hot or cold in one and OK in the other and just turn the fan on instead of heat/AC. And here we go...I guess I am not making that dumb "smart thermostat" ant smarter.
This is why we need to be pushing for devices that use open protocols at the very least. (Ideally they'd be fully open devices.)
It saddens me to see people buy into IoT and not think about the vendor lock-in or data exfiltration. The thing is, there really aren't any alternatives.
This makes it seem like you would have to use the "Works with Google Assistant" API's instead? i.e. rather than completely not available, there's a new platform?
Don't know about either API to know if that's the case, but it's what the page implies?
Not sure about the "Hello" but this sucks for people that take advantage of their thermostat API. The hardware still works but the way I use it won't any more.
Google decides to unify APIs under a single IoT brand, thus shutting down redundant APIs. Google bad.
Google maintaining multiple APIs that essentially do the same thing. Google bad.
People are going to complain either way. I welcome this change personally and think it makes perfect business sense. I can't think of any Works with Nest that I have integrated in my home that's not already connected to my Google Home, so I don't really see this impacting many negatively.
While I'm frustrated at this, I'm wondering if what I'm feeling is a knee-jerk reaction.
I wonder how the Actions on Google Smart Homes integration works.
Will I still be able to control my Nest thermostats from Google Smart Home Actions? This seems to be mentioned, but it's unclear what I'm able to do and how.
It seems weird they're announcing this during I/O - you'd think they'd avoid telling developers that their platforms sometimes shut down with 3 months notice and with no replacement provided when everyone's paying attention.
I went through the elaborate motions of setting up HomeBridge to make my pre-HomeKit Nest ecosystem inter operate with my Apple devices. Now they’ve gone and trashed it. I guess I’ll just replace all their devices and Google can go to hell.
The worst part is that Google Home is a complete shit-show so far. I constantly have to redo device setups for dvices that randomly disappear, recreate groups that lose one or more (and sometimes all) devices, and physically reset devices that randomly disconnect from wifi. It's been a terrible experience so far. I'd get rid of it completely if Alexa would let me like songs on Spotify, but that's another conversation altogether.
Me too. I was literally just looking at them, since I wanted to hook up a smart thermostat with my motorized blinds (close blinds in summer when temperature is > X) and was planning on buying one this month, but no longer.
You keep repeating this in your comments like
a broken record. What do _you_ care that people care? People obviously do care or they wouldn’t be voicing on HN? Why does that bother you so much?
Because I believe many of the responses are irrational, and not expressing what the actual underlying feelings are of the commenters.
People are upset that there is a reduction in the openness of things, which I understand. People are upset that their personal projects and home hacks will stop working, which I understand.
They should just state that though, and not the "That's it I'm never buying Nest again" type of angry response.
If you want to hack your home, there are many open source alternatives.
>If you want to hack your home, there are many open source alternatives.
Nest used to be one of those alternatives, and everyone who bought into it is screwed. I did not buy into it because I figured it would happen. It does not make it any less horrible that it did happen.
I understand everyone wants to dump on Google here, but Nest labs is the company that made the API, not Google, and AFAIK they never turned a profit. So as far as "promises" go, Google didn't really make a promise to anyone w.r.t the API FWICT. Google has shuttered their own products plenty, but when you purchase a loss-making company you're going to want to streamline everything, so you can make your money back.
I wonder if it's time to re-evaluate the concept of "not invented here". Services that exist at another company's pleasure aren't a platform to build a business on. This is effectively a type a single sourcing. There are no contractual obligations to you on the part of the service provider, and tremendous leverage to undermine you if you ever get big enough to get noticed.
So a personal project then, not a commercial one. My guess is they just lost a new customer with you.
The root of my question though is this: Is most API use a hobby thing, or a professional thing businesses are build around?
My assumption here is that the financial impact is trivial for them. They aren't Valve ending Half-Life modding for example. If that's not a clear analogy, Valve's enabling of modding for Half-Life enabled Counter Strike, which basically kept Valve alive so they could become what they are now.
Nest's income/expense is likely a rounding error on the Google balance sheet. Killing off the Nest developer ecosystem is a choice, not driven by any economics.
I have eight Nest thermostats across two homes, and a pile of Nest cameras. My "hobbyist" use of the APIs collects and aggregates some of the data together since the Nest UI (web or mobile) is lousy at best. Given that Google Home / Google Assistant do not work* with my G Suite account, I'm not at all confident about continuing to use Nest equipment after the grand changeover to Google Home Assistant Whatever in August.
* By "do not work" I mean: You log in to a Google Home device with a G Suite account and it (the device) cannot be shared with any other accounts, and it cannot access any of your data like your calendar. Oddly Alexa has no difficulties accessing my G Suite calendar.
I haven't been involved in the home automation industry for a while, but if there were any integrations that used this API from DIY or commercial platforms like Homeseer, Control4, Crestron, AMX, or dozens of others, those will no longer work.
There are lots of mostly invisible companies selling high-end automation that don't need to advertise so you'll never have heard of them. It's not just hobbyists that build this stuff.
I thought about buying a thermostat for my district heating radiators. But for the time being I just manage with a cheap thermometer and regulating the radiator manually, because they already have a crude thermostat. It works quite good, because weather is not changing as fast day to day and heating season is not very long.
It really feels like Google is starting to be forced to actually make money on things or get rid of them. With Nest that means sell more of their products and ecosystem instead of supporting everybody else...given last quarter's numbers etc. it looks like they may need to begin to focus on that, especially if the ad revenues continue to go down.
Just bought a home this year and I am so glad I went with Ecobee and Ubiquiti Unifi cameras.
If your model is a subscription service I don’t want your product. Especially if they are acquired by Google. Google has acquired and killed (or killed their own products) more products than almost any company I use.
And there went my love for Nest. I’ve been one of the earliest adopters...love the product. After they got acquired by Google I’ve been expecting this, however, not so soon.
Time to start looking into an alternative - suggestions anyone?
This sort of thing by Google (along with dropping many beloved consumer products) has become such a regular occurrence that I wonder how much it has impacted the tepid adoption of Google Cloud by developers.
It will be interesting to see if some open source firmware comes out of this. I wonder if we will see people "jailbreaking" their IoT devices to work with more open/collaborative marketplaces.
Does anyone know of a good replacement for the Nest Protect Smoke Alarms? Lots of recs for ecobee and insteon for thermostats, but I'd love a smoke detector recommendation.
I have thousands of dollars of Ubiquiti gear in my house, but I opted for Ring cameras instead.
Primarily because, even though I have plenty of storage space for an NVR, I don't want to rely on thieves not stealing the thing if they break in, thus leaving me with no footage. It would be easy enough to constantly back the data up to a different location, I suppose, but not something I wanted to bother with.
They also integrate pretty well with the Ring alarm system, and the $10/mo I pay for monitoring alarm service for burglary and smoke/co2 detectors I have also covers the storage cost for multiple cameras, etc.
I just picked up a smart lock that will supposedly get additional integration later this year, and be able to disarm the alarm system automatically when it's unlocked. (This functionality already exists for some other smart lock options)
Under the FAQ, I was not able to find an entry like "Will I be able to reach a human about my Nest devices / services?". That's a bit scary. Not sure if that was possible before though. But, considering the occasional horror story of what happens when you get locked out of a Google account, I wonder what the impact will be having a Nest integrated with that.
This is why Google will not be able to sell things not backed by an SLA and a contract to the enterprise.
Guess what, GSuite and GC are covered by SLAs/contracts.
But yes, this is a stupid move by Google, trying to lock out other controllers/apps. I have been looking at home automation and I want:
a) open APIs
b) security
c) functionality
So what you're saying is Google is giving another red flag that any work done with them should only be considered a privilege that can be revoked at any time? It's funny I found this article and I'd literally just been thinking about how I need to avoid Google products because I can't afford to have my workflow just up and disappear when someone at Google gets promoted to a higher level management.
Questions I won't get answers to, but about which I'm curious anyway:
1. How many end-users are affected?
2. How many devs are affected?
3. What is the annual transaction volume that is affected?
Depending on the magnitude of the answers to these questions, I can see turning this API off being either a good thing or a bad thing. If hundreds of users are affected, well. Sad, but sometimes unpopular things get turned off. If hundreds of thousands of users are affected, this is an eyebrow-raising decision.
Developers are also important, but less so than users. It would be nice to keep the lights on just to let people tinker, but that same openness creates security risks and costs money. Many on this site praise Apple when they make restrictive decisions that harm devs, as long as those decisions are justified in terms of end-user privacy and security.
I think the transaction volume question gets at the heart of the issue, at least for me. If there is a lot of economic activity here, that's a signal that user needs might not be accounted for in this decision, or at least are not its primary driver. On the other hand, if only $1M or $2M per year is changing hands in the affected part of the ecosystem, well . . . again, nothing lasts forever.
This will break the integrations with all leading Smart Home control platforms. Ones that come to mind: Insteon; Alexa; Smart Things; IFTTT. I’m sure there are many more I’m not thinking of. Google is making a bet that they can close their smart home ecosystem and drive customers into their walled garden, instead of out.
> No. The Actions on Google Smart Home platform does not provide open API access to Nest devices, so it cannot be used to access and control Nest devices. Instead, managing and controlling Google Home, Nest, and thousands of third-party smart home devices is done through the Google Home app and the Google Assistant.
Wow, just wow. The entire non-Google Nest ecosystem evaporates overnight.