Buggy and inconsistent
I’ve owned 2 Google Home’s since they first launched a year ago, and I am continually blown away with the poor quality of their software and the Google Assistant AI. Over the past year, it has gotten much worse at being able to correctly identify when it is being spoken to, even with no other noise in the room. And the 3rd party “skills” are almost all useless and the voices sound terrible and rarely work correctly if at all.
This app is even worse. It has a horrible user interface that changes constantly in small ways, making hunting down particular settings hard to find under the best of circumstances, but even harder when they suddenly move a preference to a new area.
The current version of the app is also buggy and thinks one of my Google Home’s is somehow a Chromecast and prevents me from accessing its settings forcing me to factory restore the Home 3 times now and still no luck.
As for the “Home” part - home control is a joke compared to HomeKit and I have given up trying to use to actually CONSISTENTLY manage and control a home. The fact that things break in this app or move around all the time, coupled with the worsening performance of the Home hardware and it mistakenly waking up despite no one speaking the wake phrase, has convinced me Google doesn’t belong in the hardware business. And their demand that you let them track you on the web and across their services (including your location) to even use the Home is disingenuous). They claim it needs to know everything about you to provide you with the best experience, except it is hopelessly stupid and over the last year I’ve seen ZERO evidence that the data google has been gathering is doing anything to help me and more likely is just helping them profile me to know how to sell me out to advertisers.
I’ll be getting Apple’s HomePods as soon they come out and tossing these pieces of crap out.
PS If you want to see how a well thought out Home control product should work, look at HomeKit and at Apple’s Home app. With HomeKit I have control locally with the ability to logically assign rooms, floors, zones, and groups and to create automations and scenes. Google can’t do anything other than assign devices to a room. No further grouping, no native automation, and the biggest hole - no scene creation and no central app for controlling my home. This Home app is so frustratingly useless compared to Apple’s Home app for HomeKit.
HomeKit is a well thought out solution that is in a different league than Google’s bare minimum effort that rarely works like you would hope or expect.
AustxCyclist about
Google Home, v1.25.1223