Google keeps failing its Nest customers
Google has spent nearly the last decade completely ruining any goodwill Nest had established through a comedy of errors and sheer, wanton incompetence.It's absolutely breathtaking how bad Google is at shipping functioning software. I don't know how Rick Osterloh or Rishi Chandra still have jobs, but they should answer for the following litany of catastrophic product decisions:* Google decides to abandon Nest as a separate, highly-prized brand and product line, and instead bring everything under the Google Home umbrella. This process is excruciating and a monumental, half-decade-long failure. It is the very definition of a legacy rewrite pattern gone awry, but coupled with billions of dollars of purchased, installed hardware in people's actual homes.* This starts with the "force Nest users to have a Google account to use Nest" and "Googlekill Works With Nest" decisions. Google decides to gate certain features and to encourage people to upgrade to the Google Home implementation of the Nest functionality, but completely left feature parity a decade behind.To wit, Google Home's app, beyond being buggy, also can't do basic things like allow for easy scrubbing of video feeds, or control of the Nest Protect smoke detectors.* Google also willfully murders Works With Nest, and kills with it the goodwill of hundreds of manufacturers who were pretty excited to build compatible products and services. This is migrated to a Works with Google/Assistant product that... again, completely lacks parity. They break the Home/Away functionality entirely. They delay this process a bit, and Works with Google catches up in some ways, but it takes literal years.* Google releases a new line of Nest Cams that... don't work with the Nest app. Indeed, you have to activate them in the Google Home app, and their feeds will not display in the Nest app. From a Product Manager perspective, this is very easy to back into: Google is on a slow, death-march termination of the Nest app, in favor of migrating to Google Home. Rather than building any new functionality into the Nest app (these new cams included battery and floodlight functions, for example), they decided it made more sense to force users to use the Google Home app.Except... the Google Home app STILL lacks parity with the now-8-year-old Nest app. The Google Home app, as of May the 8th in the year of our lord 2023, does not support the fantastic SightView video scrubbing functionality. Or, as it happens, ANY scrubbing functionality. It doesn't support the ability to generate and download video clips. And the web version, which has been in a public preview for over a year, STILL doesn't support the ability to even view the pre-tagged movement sessions that you can view in the mobile app.But to say this again: new Nest Cam users cannot view 100% of the video recorded by the Nest Cams. It is functionally impossible and completely ridiculous, considering the Dropcam/earlier Nest Cams have been able to do this for literally a decade.* Beyond that sheer lunacy, Rick Osterloh gets up on stage and has the temerity to announce with a big dumb grin on his face the Nest Doorbell: the "upgrade" (in literally no metric) from the older Nest Hello. This product has two variants: a wired and battery powered version, for people who don't have doorbell wiring. The wired product manages to ship into end users' hands with a curious limitation: even when wired, the product is INCAPABLE of recording 24-hour footage. Note that the Nest Hello, launched in 2017, supported this functionality out of the box and still does. When pressed for a reason, Rick says that the thermals were a limitation, coupled with how thin they wanted to make the product.I'll say this again slowly: for some reason, a Product Manager at Google thought that the THINNESS of a PERMANENTLY INSTALLED, FIXED LOCATION VIDEO DOORBELL was more important than its ability to actually record video reliably. How on earth do these people still have jobs?* Which brings us to two weeks ago. Google had already announced back in 2020 that they were killing the brilliantly designed, beautiful, extremely functional, nearly perfect Nest Secure alarm system. They stopped selling it, and then sunk $450M of money into ADT for... literally what reason, no one on planet earth can say. At the time, they announced they'd continue to support the Nest Secure.Well, that's no longer compatible with their designs to migrate people to the Google Home app, or to return their boondoggle style investment in ADT, so two weeks ago, Google announced that they'll be bricking every single person's Nest Secure, along with their (also) brilliantly designed hybrid Nest Detects: their combination motion and door open sensors, which _also_ feature a muting button and little nightlight. These things are a wonder of design, and still function perfect, and Google has decided to literally pull the plug and create an entire mountain of e-waste for the hell of it.They're offering users a free ADT system, which includes an ENORMOUS hub that is literally 5 times the size of the Nest Guard hub, and two motion and door sensors. That's it. There are users who spent hundreds and even thousands of dollars on Google's Nest Secure hardware, buying additional Nest Detect sensors, and they're all going into the trash now and literally no one knows why.Worse, the new product is markedly worse in every way. The ADT Hub is ENORMOUS. It has no business being this big. It does literally everything the Nest Guard does, but the Nest Guard is 1/5th the size, and tastefully designed. This thing looks like one of those massive cable modem/wireless router hybrids, except it's also your keypad for disarming your system. Gross. (Nest Guard crammed in battery backup, wifi, Nest Thread, cellular backup, a voice speaker, and an alarm siren into a very tasteful package.)Beyond that, Nest is also inherently stripping another piece of brilliant design for NO REASON: The Nest x Yale door lock (which I have three of in my house) currently unlocks my door AND disarms my security system automatically when I get home. It's hard to describe how amazing this functionality is. There is absolutely no indication that there will be any way to get the replacement ADT system to disarm from the door lock, even though Google has floated this idea of "Routines" (and a script engine) for over a year , with nothing to show for it.So in a year, I'll literally have to throw away my perfectly good Nest Guard and Nest Detects. I'm creating e-waste. I'll be replacing them with an uglier system with more parts and less functionality. How is this a win, Google?If I strip out the most cynical view of what's happening here (Google wanting to amp up sales of the ADT product they've invested in, but maybe not, because, again, they're actually giving these things away for free to Nest Secure users, so ostensibly losing money here), I can again understand how they came to such a hamfisted decision: they don't want to migrate the Nest Secure functionality into the Google Home app, and they signed a dumb agreement with ADT to sunset it.But once again, Google chooses to ignore the reputational damage and damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. They'll brick your perfectly functional hardware and make you downgrade to the newer, shittier model. And no one over there has the power to stop it? What the hell is Sundar doing over there, other than firing people and cashing insanely fat bonus checks?Meanwhile, Google also:* Migrated the Google Home Hubs away from legacy Linux OS to Fuschia, and then promptly murdered the Thread functionality that the locks and thermostat work with, removing a mesh network component* Still hasn't released a video scrubber for their new cameras. I cannot conceive of how this has taken them so long. This is the same company that owns YouTube, YouTubeTV, and... checks notes... the existing, already functional Nest app that does exactly what we want* Is ALSO killing old legacy Dropcams. More e-waste. These cameras work just fine, but Google is murdering them anyway. They're shipping you a replacement if you're an active Nest Aware subscriber, but only for up to two cameras.* Is NOT offering ANY compensation AT ALL for Nest Secure users outside of the US. They're just willfully destroying your $400-$1500+ investment for the hell of it.* Claims to be environmentally minded but generates e-waste with these deprecations.Google should take a page out of Sonos's book, when they caught the unholy backlash for their equally stupid idea of bricking legacy Sonos products: spin them out to a legacy app. Or build a connector, or open-source the firmware, or rewrite the firmware to even work with ADT. There are so many options that could be pursued in the year they've given us before they murder this thing. You would think a literal trillion dollar company could find their way here, but time and time again, Google proves that they don't know how to release hardware with a cohesive strategy. It's all spray and pray, and it's ridiculous.* Oh, and they're doing all sorts of stupid stuff with FitBit too, but I won't even get into that.How. Do. These. People. Still. Have. Jobs. There. How do they expect to ever be trusted by anyone again? How do they think this is a good or right call, and why is no one speaking up and advocating for their USERS? I'm genuinely asking. I don't work there, I don't understand how something like this happens.