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Few things in the tech world are as fraught as smart home updates.
This is your home.
Google Home struggled to find my new thermostat. Then, after the transfer to Google Home Public preview, it lost the new thermostat.
It’s your life.
It’s your temperature.
It’s your security.
Google Home struggled to find my new thermostat. Then, after the transfer to Google Home Public preview, it lost the new thermostat.
And yet, it never works out that way.
As I’ve written, my smart home is a non-homogenous mess.
Recently, I stayed at a friend’s home that was built just a few years ago.
Some things went better than others in the transition. The key is to use the Public Preview.
She smartly standardized onAmazon’s Alexa for all her smart home bits.
I owneda Dropcam that was so oldthat Nest and Google stopped supporting it last year.
My wife, in particular, hates new technology.
It is a lovely new Google Nest Learning Thermostat
If something works, why touch it?
I would agree, except for my job which has been defined by 38 years of trying new stuff.
When Google unveiled its newGoogle Nest Learning thermostat 4th Generation, I was intrigued.
Which of my two classic Nest thermostats would I replace?
How would I tell my wife?
Instead, I waited for her to notice.
I manage both my thermostats and multiple Nest cams through the app.
I ignored these entreaties, and I did so until I installed the new Google Nest Learning Thermostat.
It only works with Google Home.
During installation, Google offers to migrate your account.
With this new thermostat, though, I had no choice.
The platform automatically migrates existing Nest devices to the new platform to ease the whole process.
Well, it would if it worked.
No matter what I did, I could not migrate my existing hardware to Google Home.
Managing two nest Thermostats on two separate apps was the opposite of smart.
In fact, they’d already completed some of the work.
I switched to the Public Preview, and soon, my Google Home was automatically ingesting my old hardware.
All but one: the brand new Nest Learning Thermostat 4th Gen.
It was nowhere to be found.
While switching to the Google Home Public Preview, that thermostat disappeared.
I tried restarting the thermostat and even did multiple factory resets.
I contacted Google again, and they asked for the serial number and my account ID.
Desperate, I gave them both.
This time, though, I saw something new: The thermostat was downloading something.
I assume it was an update forced by Google and the Public Preview app.
This process was hard.
A tech “expert”.
Encouraged, I continued the setup in Google Home.
Google Home makes this simple: There’s a big plus next to my Google ID.
Naturally, it failed, not once but every one of the half-dozen times I tried.
That makes sense, though a message in the app to that effect would’ve been helpful.
But this process was hard.
A tech “expert.”
It’s also unreasonable to think consumers will upgrade their homes wholesale.
They will have aging smart home technology.
Shipping products that force unsupported change even if it’s temporary is bad form.
I’ve long complained that Apple Homekit is a mess and has yet to improve my smart home life.
We will fail as a smart home industry until Google and others solve this.
And if someone says to me “Matterwill make it all better,.”
I may just punch them.
