I’m tired of broken smart homes

While smart homes can be quite practical, they also require a cerkind of neverend vigilance. Specifically, you must keep which companies support which platforms and whether any mergers or acquisitions royally screwed up your entire setup. Then you have to decide if you’re going to have to find an alternative way to keep everything you have in place, or if it is just easier to reinvest entirely in another platform.

Case in point: Google buys Nest. While $ 3.2 billion acquisition happened six long years ago, on the eve of 2014, Nest founder Tony Fadell promised that nothing in the day-to-day running of Nest would change. And for five years, that was mostly true. Then last year Google I / O, Google killed Nest as everyone knew, renaming Google Nest and announcing a forced migration. Works with Nest, the developer program that enabled third-party integrations, was essentially kaput. Although the developers could support existing Works with Nest products, new ones were banned.

Now, Philips Hue, a major player in the smart home industry, has announced that it will withdraw all support from Nest Thermostat, Nest Cam, and Nest Protect starting November 17.. The news was first reported by Ambient, and in the app notifications that users receive, Philips Hue notes that the interruption “will only be temporary” because Works with Nest features will eventually be integrated into the Google Home app.

Okay, but this transition has been going on for about a year and a half now, and people are still waiting for the full functionality of Works with Nest to arrive on the Google platform. According to Ambient, once Works with Nest was removed, the ability to turn your Hue lights on or off based on Nest’s geofencing features was also killed. This ability only returned at the beginning of last month, when Google introduced the Home and Away routines for the Google Assistant.

If you were one of those people who relied on Works with Nest to personalize your Philips Hue lighting, that’s beyond annoying. The value of a smart home, and in particular smart lighting, is to create a setup where your devices talk to each other to make your life easier to automate. The platonic ideal is to create a routine where, for example, you leave your home, your thermostat reduces the temperature, and your smart lights automatically turn off. When you return, these lights will automatically turn back on and your thermostat will turn on. These automations should be easy. They are not. They are rarely perfect, and there are a lot of lawsuits and mistake before getting it right, but it’s a reasons why many people decide to invest in smart homes to begin with. And with this Nest transition, there is so many obstacles to the fluidity of automation.

To begin with, force migration without having an alternative already up on multiple smart home platforms was asking for trouble. For example, Nest users who chose to run their homes through Amazon Echo devices were screwed after the old Nest skill Alexa was murdered. The new Google Nest skill not only requires users to migrate accounts, but also allows you to deactivate previous Works with Nest skills. Now if you browse the Google Nest Skill Reviews, you’ll see a lot of 1 star customer reviews noting that configurations that once worked perfectly are now unnecessary. Likewise, with this news from Philips Hue, you’ll have more Nest users who may need to find new ways to maintain their routines or design new ways to fully use their devices.

Philips Hue advises in a Blog for Nest users to link their Philips Hue account to the Google Home app, learn how to set up routines, and then possibly explore the Hue Labs Formula. This … is not so useful if you have already invested in using Nest with Amazon Echo devices, however. Then again, you can just throw away all your Echo devices and buy back cheaper Google Nest speakers and hubs like Google wants you to do. Alternatively, you can go through If This Then That (IFTTT), but this service too recently limited their free offer to three applets, which means you’ll have to pay a monthly fee if you want more advanced automations. Or, maybe, you could just buy a HomeBridge or yet another device like the Starling Home Hub to pass it through HomeKit if you have subscribed enough the Apple ecosystem. Or, you can ditch Nest altogether and go with the smart thermostat or another company’s cameras. Or you can just have at least one Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri smart speaker in your house, like I do, and create routines on each of them so you never have to worry about a smart home broken. (Unless of course you’re buying from a small company that has a high probabilityty to end up going bankrupt, leaving you with a brick-built gadget.)

Either way you slice it, this is exactly the kind of ripple effect that regularly causes smart home users to tear their hair apart in frustration. It doesn’t matter technically this has been going on for a very long time. In an ideal world, Google would have fully replicated Works with Nest functionality in Google Home before kill the first. Ideally, full solutions would have been deployed on other platforms, like Amazon Alexa and HomeKit, before all of this, as well. But, no, tech giants are petty when it comes to cultivating their walled gardens and the real “losers” are consumers who don’t jump into a company’s product line.

But the end result is you get people who are just fed up with constantly fixing their broken smart homes. You get people looking at their bulbs before a move dreading the nightmare of reconfiguring routines and labeling which bulb is associated with what in their apps, wondering why, oh why, they didn’t settle for lighting. “stupid”. Honestly, until these companies learn to play nice and let the consumer build their home reliably the way they want, the smart home will never reach its full potential.