Not a work workspace but our family workspace, so very unreasonable. They forced us all to migrate to that...
For many years Google Home with all the Nest speakers and displays have worked fine. But you are not allowed to use the nest cameras, thermostats, doorbells, etc with workspace accounts. Hence I regret buying those.
A Google Workspace account does not work for Nest. I signed up for the free Google-email-but-with-your-domain thing more than a decade ago. A bit more recently but back when I was still a Google fanboy I bought a Nest thermostat and was astonished that my account could not be used for Nest.
Offices, on the other hand? Marginally more competitive. My last office had a Google Mini lying around! Not nailed to a wall, though I suppose it could have been and provided the same utility.
No, that's not true. I was using it to shim a monitor for a while. Nest still reigns supreme.
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.
misleading. Without a Nest account, hardware optional. Nest is Google's brand for home automation, and they are trying to consolidate logins, much like the past 5 years has been across their other vast array of products.
Google has spent nearly the last decade completely ruining any goodwill Nest had established through a comedy of errors and sheer, wanton incompetence.
It's absolutely breathtaking how bad Google is at shipping functioning software. I don't know how Rick Osterloh or Rishi Chandra still have jobs, but they should answer for the following litany of catastrophic product decisions:
* Google decides to abandon Nest as a separate, highly-prized brand and product line, and instead bring everything under the Google Home umbrella. This process is excruciating and a monumental, half-decade-long failure. It is the very definition of a legacy rewrite pattern gone awry, but coupled with billions of dollars of purchased, installed hardware in people's actual homes.
* This starts with the "force Nest users to have a Google account to use Nest" and "Googlekill Works With Nest" decisions. Google decides to gate certain features and to encourage people to upgrade to the Google Home implementation of the Nest functionality, but completely left feature parity a decade behind.
To wit, Google Home's app, beyond being buggy, also can't do basic things like allow for easy scrubbing of video feeds, or control of the Nest Protect smoke detectors.
* Google also willfully murders Works With Nest, and kills with it the goodwill of hundreds of manufacturers who were pretty excited to build compatible products and services. This is migrated to a Works with Google/Assistant product that... again, completely lacks parity. They break the Home/Away functionality entirely. They delay this process a bit, and Works with Google catches up in some ways, but it takes literal years.
* Google releases a new line of Nest Cams that... don't work with the Nest app. Indeed, you have to activate them in the Google Home app, and their feeds will not display in the Nest app. From a Product Manager perspective, this is very easy to back into: Google is on a slow, death-march termination of the Nest app, in favor of migrating to Google Home. Rather than building any new functionality into the Nest app (these new cams included battery and floodlight functions, for example), they decided it made more sense to force users to use the Google Home app.
Except... the Google Home app STILL lacks parity with the now-8-year-old Nest app. The Google Home app, as of May the 8th in the year of our lord 2023, does not support the fantastic SightView video scrubbing functionality. Or, as it happens, ANY scrubbing functionality. It doesn't support the ability to generate and download video clips. And the web version, which has been in a public preview for over a year, STILL doesn't support the ability to even view the pre-tagged movement sessions that you can view in the mobile app.
But to say this again: new Nest Cam users cannot view 100% of the video recorded by the Nest Cams. It is functionally impossible and completely ridiculous, considering the Dropcam/earlier Nest Cams have been able to do this for literally a decade.
* Beyond that sheer lunacy, Rick Osterloh gets up on stage and has the temerity to announce with a big dumb grin on his face the Nest Doorbell: the "upgrade" (in literally no metric) from the older Nest Hello. This product has two variants: a wired and battery powered version, for people who don't have doorbell wiring. The wired product manages to ship into end users' hands with a curious limitation: even when wired, the product is INCAPABLE of recording 24-hour footage. Note that the Nest Hello, launched in 2017, supported this functionality out of the box and still does. When pressed for a reason, Rick says that the thermals were a limitation, coupled with how thin they wanted to make the product.
I'll say this again slowly: for some reason, a Product Manager at Google thought that the THINNESS of a PERMANENTLY INSTALLED, FIXED LOCATION VIDEO DOORBELL was more important than its ability to actually record video reliably. How on earth do these people still have jobs?
* Which brings us to two weeks ago. Google had already announced back in 2020 that they were killing the brilliantly designed, beautiful, extremely functional, nearly perfect Nest Secure alarm system. They stopped selling it, and then sunk $450M of money into ADT for... literally what reason, no one on planet earth can say. At the time, they announced they'd continue to support the Nest Secure.
Well, that's no longer compatible with their designs to migrate people to the Google Home app, or to return their boondoggle style investment in ADT, so two weeks ago, Google announced that they'll be bricking every single person's Nest Secure, along with their (also) brilliantly designed hybrid Nest Detects: their combination motion and door open sensors, which _also_ feature a muting button and little nightlight. These things are a wonder of design, and still function perfect, and Google has decided to literally pull the plug and create an entire mountain of e-waste for the hell of it.
They're offering users a free ADT system, which includes an ENORMOUS hub that is literally 5 times the size of the Nest Guard hub, and two motion and door sensors. That's it. There are users who spent hundreds and even thousands of dollars on Google's Nest Secure hardware, buying additional Nest Detect sensors, and they're all going into the trash now and literally no one knows why.
Worse, the new product is markedly worse in every way. The ADT Hub is ENORMOUS. It has no business being this big. It does literally everything the Nest Guard does, but the Nest Guard is 1/5th the size, and tastefully designed. This thing looks like one of those massive cable modem/wireless router hybrids, except it's also your keypad for disarming your system. Gross. (Nest Guard crammed in battery backup, wifi, Nest Thread, cellular backup, a voice speaker, and an alarm siren into a very tasteful package.)
Beyond that, Nest is also inherently stripping another piece of brilliant design for NO REASON: The Nest x Yale door lock (which I have three of in my house) currently unlocks my door AND disarms my security system automatically when I get home. It's hard to describe how amazing this functionality is. There is absolutely no indication that there will be any way to get the replacement ADT system to disarm from the door lock, even though Google has floated this idea of "Routines" (and a script engine) for over a year , with nothing to show for it.
So in a year, I'll literally have to throw away my perfectly good Nest Guard and Nest Detects. I'm creating e-waste. I'll be replacing them with an uglier system with more parts and less functionality. How is this a win, Google?
If I strip out the most cynical view of what's happening here (Google wanting to amp up sales of the ADT product they've invested in, but maybe not, because, again, they're actually giving these things away for free to Nest Secure users, so ostensibly losing money here), I can again understand how they came to such a hamfisted decision: they don't want to migrate the Nest Secure functionality into the Google Home app, and they signed a dumb agreement with ADT to sunset it.
But once again, Google chooses to ignore the reputational damage and damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. They'll brick your perfectly functional hardware and make you downgrade to the newer, shittier model. And no one over there has the power to stop it? What the hell is Sundar doing over there, other than firing people and cashing insanely fat bonus checks?
Meanwhile, Google also:
* Migrated the Google Home Hubs away from legacy Linux OS to Fuschia, and then promptly murdered the Thread functionality that the locks and thermostat work with, removing a mesh network component
* Still hasn't released a video scrubber for their new cameras. I cannot conceive of how this has taken them so long. This is the same company that owns YouTube, YouTubeTV, and... checks notes... the existing, already functional Nest app that does exactly what we want
* Is ALSO killing old legacy Dropcams. More e-waste. These cameras work just fine, but Google is murdering them anyway. They're shipping you a replacement if you're an active Nest Aware subscriber, but only for up to two cameras.
* Is NOT offering ANY compensation AT ALL for Nest Secure users outside of the US. They're just willfully destroying your $400-$1500+ investment for the hell of it.
* Claims to be environmentally minded but generates e-waste with these deprecations.
Google should take a page out of Sonos's book, when they caught the unholy backlash for their equally stupid idea of bricking legacy Sonos products: spin them out to a legacy app. Or build a connector, or open-source the firmware, or rewrite the firmware to even work with ADT. There are so many options that could be pursued in the year they've given us before they murder this thing. You would think a literal trillion dollar company could find their way here, but time and time again, Google proves that they don't know how to release hardware with a cohesive strategy. It's all spray and pray, and it's ridiculous.
* Oh, and they're doing all sorts of stupid stuff with FitBit too, but I won't even get into that.
How. Do. These. People. Still. Have. Jobs. There. How do they expect to ever be trusted by anyone again? How do they think this is a good or right call, and why is no one speaking up and advocating for their USERS? I'm genuinely asking. I don't work there, I don't understand how something like this happens.
> I’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.
Nest has been so terribly mismanaged seemingly from the beginning of the acquisition; has there been any management level change to compensate for the poor execution?
I really like the look of the Nest thermometer, but I definitely don't want Google in control of anything in my house, or listening to anything in my house, with how the manage this stuff.
If I do automate anything, I will be going with Home Assistant, even though I kind of despise home rolling these sorts of things. I don't trust any of the major players, and their recent behavior and lack of care for the user makes me nervous for the future of tech.
I’ll add my lament. We use nest cameras, a nest thermostat and google WiFi. As part of their recent forced account merge our WiFi controls no longer work.
Their apps are buggy and freeze-prone, and ironically continually trying to sell more product when the existing ones don’t work well.
I’m regrettably having to replace everything to get off this treadmill. Lesson learned.
Nest was a Google subsidiary before Alphabet was formed. Across the street from their offices are Google offices. I've talked to Nest employees about their use of Google infrastructure, in a Google office.
It didn't seem like there was any more separation than you'd expect of the Android and chromecast groups, for example.
I recall news that many of the developers at Nest were basically moving to Google Hardware. There's a valid question on whether or not Nest will even produce anything going forward, or if they're legacy support for products that eventually will be replaced by Google Home equivalents.
In 2015 Nest posted job listings for its "Nest Audio Team." The team would be responsible for "developing an audio roadmap for Nest products." Industry observers suspected the audio team was building a smart Bluetooth speaker, but Google beat Nest to the punch with Google Home, an Amazon Echo-style Bluetooth speaker and voice assistant appliance. According to a report from The Information, when Nest found out about Google Home, it asked to work on the project with Google. Nest's request was turned down. We can only guess why—maybe Nest's reputation inside Google had something to do with it?
Often times Google has multiple projects doing effectively the same "thing" going at the same time. They don't work together because the idea is to have the team that can get to the "finish line" first to win, not to co-operate. This, as it was explained to me by an engineering director there, was to encourage a 'natural selection mechanism that selected for the best teams and the best products.'
While I understood the idea, that you would pit your own resources against each other like that was kind of foreign to me. My own personal learning from that, having watched them for 15 years, four of which from the inside, is that as a way of managing a company it produces few viable products and no viable businesses.
I really wish Google/Nest would end their corporate beef with Apple and integrate with HomeKit. What happened with the openness of Google?
Instead of buying Nest's entire line to outfit the house I'm building, I'm avoiding them completely even though I think their products are at the top of their class.
Nest isn't unique anymore... neither are their cameras... and they are late to the party with the doorbell. Do I think they are great products? Absolutely!! But they aren't in a position of leverage, the market is becoming commoditized, and forcing consumers to use only your app is a poor strategy. Especially considering it wasn't until a few weeks ago did Nest's app support iPhone X's new format, MONTHs after it was available to the public.
I just bought a roomba and was happy that they weren’t owned by Google or Amazon. This is unfortunate.
I owned nests before Google bought them and it was sad to both see their innovation decline (basically the same now as 8 years ago) and usability decline (forcing Google logins).
re: thermostats, camera, fire alarms etc.. what did you move to? I'm looking for something integrated as well. I would really love for google to get their shit together, but rational thinking says I can't with Nest one way or the other.
I thankfully haven't bought any Nest devices, but your mention of Google Home turns out to have triggered me slightly!
Many years ago, I bought a bunch of Chromecast Audio devices - these are/were little wifi dongles with a 3.5mm jack and USB power. I could set them up as a group and they'd sync perfectly with each other. I had a pretty cheap multi-room sound system.
Then at some point, the Google app I was using for them stopped working and it transpired the functionality had been moved to "Google Home". Over the following few months I spent hours turning the things off and on again, resetting them, re-creating groups, but it never worked for more than a few hours. I gave up, went back to bluetooth.
For many years Google Home with all the Nest speakers and displays have worked fine. But you are not allowed to use the nest cameras, thermostats, doorbells, etc with workspace accounts. Hence I regret buying those.
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