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 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!
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I get that, and I think it's sad they cut it for that reason, but can we at least express our thoughts in that line? "I will never buy Nest AGAIN!" stuff is like what I'd expect on Reddit or Facebook.
Can't we at least post about what the value is that's being lost?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
"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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Makes me happy I didn't buy a Google home. What's the guarantee they won't do this for home compatible devices at a later date, to move to another new ecosystem?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It's an almost stock experience and my Nexus 6P is still going strong after a battery replacement.
iOS is a non-starter for me. I refuse to buy any device that does not allow me to install whatever I want or run any code I want without paying for said privilege.
Recent developments lead me to believe that both iOS and Android are actively harmful to our future. I hope that open source operating systems for phones become robust enough in the next 20 years so that we can look back at this time as the dark ages of mobile computing.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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...).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
599 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadGoogle Is Turning Off the "Works with Nest" API
A: The Works!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
https://nest.com/whats-happening/#im-a-works-with-nest-devel...
It is hard to make a lasting business off that, which is why everyone wants to do subscription services.
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.
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."
It's just terrible, barely working, shoehorned in buggy drivers, "shipped as soon as it can appear functional" code.
You could take a microcontroller, write something simple, and have something that worked to a few 9s.
Instead, IoT vendors spend their time optimizing their data collection and monetization platforms.
"You had one job..." would be a good epitaph for the entire industry.
Not saying the OP isn't having issues, but there might be a sample bias when reading the comments.
Not all smart devices are created alike. Research your purchases.
So far the one I’ve been most happy with is IKEA Trådfri.
It costs roughly half of the comparable Phillips hue offering, but still delivers on any aspect I care about.
Works 100% locally, uses standard Zigbee (non-WiFi) networking. No cloud required.
Supports HomeKit, Alexa, google assistant, not to mention Home Assistant.
More importantly, it supports other vendor’s Zigbee devices (like Hue) and supports working with other Zigbee controllers than IKEA’s own.
Also certified non-shit by kernel-hacker Matthew Garret[1].
Nobody can shut me out of this purchase. This is actually my hardware.
[1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/47803.html
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.
https://nodered.org
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io
https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/information/supported_devices.htm...
https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/lighting/smart-lighting/
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.
Edit: They do support UPnP, but still they are wide open to attack.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/3/16083996/internet-of-shit-...
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?
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.
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.
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:
https://blog.theodo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/workflow....
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!
- security
- support
- safety
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.
Their user base just isn't us people using their services.
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.
Not a lot of value in keeping HN people happy. We're too small of a user niche but too big of complainers.
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.
Now it’s just “acquire, extinguish”
Google Doodles.
edit: by that I mean using many tools to project an image of clean smart friendliness.
Probably because it IS complete regard for the user base :/
in the future it will be "that $8000 trunk car driving computer is now a paperweight".
I'm not sure where you're drawing the conclusion that the Nest Hello no longer works.
Well, now it’s “Just a car”
I've been very happy in general that I switched to ecobee when I moved, and this made me even happier.
All that employee stock from the acquisition must be finished vesting.
[1] https://richev.me/nest
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.
I'm being a devils advocate, but ... if you were at Google and a person making large business decisions, why would you care about 1800 users?
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.
Can't we at least post about what the value is that's being lost?
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Google: Hold my Kombucha!
You misspelled Sauron.
One app to rule them all, One app to find them, One app to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
Makes me sad to say it as someone who has often defended Google in the past, but I can't on this.
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.
But isn't that the height of specialization? What does a platform mean anyways if its only used for one thing and not by others?
It it somewhat unfortunate that things like this make it abundantly clear that such a reality is not possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mobile and desktop both have more risks than the web, but they also have vastly more dependency on their ecosystems.
https://stratechery.com/2018/techs-two-philosophies/
* 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.
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10427530
What a godamn waste.
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.
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.
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." - Frank Herbert, Dune
In Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", the alient Monoliths influenced human evolution and later decided to terminate the human race instead.
In Fredrick Pohl's Heechee series, humans stumble upon abandoned alien technology and use it without understanding how it works.
Not me, though - I'm in the middle of some calibrations right now.
Money now (gambling investors?), worry later.
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.
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.
That's a way bigger problem than relying on an API or building some app in garden.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...
PowerShell still relies on conhost.
Do you mean PowerShell ISE instead of plain PowerShell or do you mean cmd.exe instead of conhost?
The risk of breaking something for someone is just too high.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE
Granted, conhost will stay for compatibility reasons and this is a new thing.
But it's open source: https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal . And according to the readme contains the source for conhost.exe too.
I don't see Google running a service at a loss for half a decade.
All gadgets that are internet connected will stop working sooner or later, I guess with Google it is sooner.
This and privacy concerns is the reason I'm abiding anything IoT. Why should I purchase something that I can't own.
Has it really, or does it simply mean that access is going to be through Google’s API going forward?
It doesn’t seem super clear, but I can see why Google wouldn’t want to maintain two separate APIs.
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.
You, who paid money and installed a device, aren't the owner. Google is.
You are a used. You aren't even qualified as a user.
I'm not even a Nest developer, but everything Google touches now turns to sh!t.
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.
* 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.
So what we need is a small piece of text-to-speech hardware that will speak commands to your Google Assistant device.
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.
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.
Or, relatedly, do you think all those labs that bought PS3's for their ability to act as Linux clusters were wrong to sue the hell out of Sony?
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.
Don't know about either API to know if that's the case, but it's what the page implies?
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."
Google has much more integration capabilities, but they seem to be this far "invite only", you can't request it.
Edit: Finally went and read the announcement. They're really not giving people much time, are they? Nevermind, three months is pretty bad.
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.
It feels like various features have been kind of frozen in place for the past few years.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
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.
After months of waffling I gave in and got one. I also regret that decision now too. Last Nest purchase I will ever make.
I wish there were an open-source Nest firmware, or at least an open-source backend. Google doesn't need to know when I'm home.
All of the complaints you just made about nest can be attributed to apple as well
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. ;)
In a few years, it will also return a profit due to an at-purchase and annual credit that my electricity utility provides.
I have pets which don't do well above a certain temperature so I keep my wireless unit by them.
If a feature that was advertised is removed after sale, this is reason to revert the sale.
One more reason to go for a completely-in-my-lan solution.
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.
When Google bought them I knew Nest would only get worse, and here we are.
They don't shut down every service, just ones that aren't performant from a business perspective.
Which, I would think, works pretty well as a business model.
Mind you that’s the old Microsoft. The new Microsoft is totally different.
> 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.
They'd kill Nest, not the WwN ecosystem.
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.
I got a defense however:
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.
Well, that pretty much killed it for me.
Hopefully most wp8 devices can be upgraded but I would not depend on that for long...
“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.
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.
One can dream. :-)
I use InboxZero through Beeminder, and could see Beeminder being locked out.
Then its impossible for the functionality to evaporate.
Ask the xmpp/jabber folks about hangouts.
I can see them keeping it around for enterprise for a bit longer, though.
Doesn’t mean they can’t get rid of it.
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.
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.
The first is out of character for google and the second is totally within your control.
All your mail is for most people merely GB at most per user.
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...
I use Feedly now too but I still miss my Reader band.
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
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7631341?hl=en
and does not have anything more to do with "anonymous" searching
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100524223335/http://www.google...
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
US Federal Trade Commission, https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements... (1983)
> 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.
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.
They will get a fraction returned. So, they still profit.
Big companies like that need fines big enough to risk closing them down for doing stuff like this. No reason for them to care otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Let's ban Google from working on life-saving medical devices, because they will just get bored and stop supporting the software.
So what? That's between the car buyers and Google. Why should they be disallowed?
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.
Consider it an incentive to avoid dependencies on external services.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta say, most annoying thing to me was discontinuing support for the Nexus 6p after only 2 years. Made me switch to iPhone for ever.
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.
It's an almost stock experience and my Nexus 6P is still going strong after a battery replacement.
iOS is a non-starter for me. I refuse to buy any device that does not allow me to install whatever I want or run any code I want without paying for said privilege.
Recent developments lead me to believe that both iOS and Android are actively harmful to our future. I hope that open source operating systems for phones become robust enough in the next 20 years so that we can look back at this time as the dark ages of mobile computing.
I'd bet a week's paycheck that Google's list would be the shorter one.
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.
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.
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
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.
The difference is probably visibility.
Microsoft have for the longest time been hiding in the cushy enterprise segment where customers pay you halt development and kill products.
Closed-off products. Perhaps not even a resonable API. Definitely not public facing.
I’m kidding about enterprise software, but it’s kind of true.
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”.
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.
First of all I’m talking developer exposure.
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)
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.
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?
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?
Let's instead just evaluate Google's behaviour as it is.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, but don't have insider knowledge on this.
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.
Not because it's not a valid criticism but because people seem to think they are the only person ever to make that damn joke.
Is that backed up by anyone else?
Because my app does not use the works-with-Nest API
Anything less than that means you're relying on a temporary situation whose end you don't control and can't predict.
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.
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 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.
edit: yes: https://www.ecobee.com/home/developer/api/examples/index.sht...
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?
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.