Never trust cloud solutions when it isn’t your cloud.
This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience
The best possibile experience is having a single app that can do the whole house, not a broken proprietary app that occupies 200 mb of space on the phone and that takes 5 seconds to start because of its fancy splash screen
Don’t understand this, they are actively kicking out customers
Ah yes best possibile experience is this: (from the ars Technica article about it)
“Sadly, this app now displays advertisement at the very top and I cannot find a way to disable it,” writes one Play Store reviewer (Google doesn’t provide links to reviews). “This is very disturbing and on top of it, it moves my garage opening button out of the visible part of the screen. So to use it I now have to first look at the ads, then scroll down and hope to find my button.”
This is what it looks like now. The ad always occupies that space at the top
My previous house was smart down to nearly every light being RGB Hue. For movie nights it kicked ass to be able to sync the lights in my living room / kitchen to the movie.
The challenge in IoT is the “I”. Many companies make cheap products that REQUIRE internet to work and are not going to work longer than a decade in most cases.
When I was designing that house I had made it a point to not purchase any device that was not Zigbee, Z-Wave or Natively compatible with HomeKit which led to a very robust setup that would continue to function even when the internet was down.
If you are dabbling I recommend making the same decision even if you plan to use GoogleHome or Alexa. The HomeKit compatible things usually cost more for a reason.