I wonder what this says for the Google/Nest Security product future. The existing Nest Secure[0] is a well designed product, but also rather limiting (only one base unit, which is frustrating for houses with multiple entrances, or large houses). The Nest Secure was released ~3 years ago, and there have been some minor feature improvements, but no hardware additions or changes.
The Nest Secure has been pretty flaky from my own experience. I agree with you that the hardware design is good, but the software is pretty terrible.
For example, many times on the Nest app I'll try to deactivate the alarm (when coming back home) but it'll give an error saying that it couldn't connect to the alarm, try again later. Yet as soon as I open the door, magically the app knows the door is open and the alarm will sound in n seconds, so clearly there's connectivity of some kind.
Furthermore, it seems that some of the requests to change the state of the alarm (disabled, armed) seem to get queued somehow, since sometimes it'll give an error when disabling the alarm through the app, then I'll go in, disable the alarm, reenable it, and a few minutes later it'll disable it as if the app message got processed later. That's pretty much the worst case scenario; not only does it not respond immediately, but it also leaves the system in a state that's not intended by the user.
It's maddening enough that I'm not buying any more Nest products. They're well designed, but it seems that nobody cares about the software past the out of box experience.
Sorry, I should have clarified my point a bit on multiple entrances. I have my keypad near one door, but the other doors are on the opposite side of the house. So my kids may open another door and start the alarm countdown going, won't get there in-time to turn it off all the time. I'd like to be able to have 2 keypads.
As well, there is the siren problem. The siren is not loud enough to be heard in all corners of my house well. I'd like to be able to have a siren in my bedroom so if it does go off in the middle of the night, it would be very clear to me.
I intentionally avoided Nest products like the plague when replacing my parents smoke alarms due to many stories like this [1][2]. Poor leadership and smart home devices do not a good marriage make.
I honestly like bradfitz's youtube video the best to show the Nest Protect (the smoke alarm) issues[0]. They have since fixed these issues, as this was the gen one protect.
For your #2 (no insider knowledge), that looks like people's accounts getting hacked and then the hackers talking through them. All home camera cloud based cameras have had these cases. I think Nest moving to Google account login system for Nest is probably the best protection against this kind of thing happening. Account takeovers happen, and guarding against them at scale is hard (especially when people reuse passwords).
For #1, I think the culture has changed a lot as it's been absorbed into Google's hardware division. Hopefully it's better, but I couldn't say anything of value there.
I swore-off Nest entirely when they shut down Nest API access to anyone but themselves. That killed it for me because I wanted to control my HVAC thermostat from my PC and without firing up Chrome or Bluestacks. I also wanted to log my own long-term thermostat and front door lock history as the Nest app only shows 10 days tops, without CSV export either (why?! That’s a horrible artificial limitation!)
The second thing was seeing Google continue to somehow justify Nest Cameras’ lack of local storage as somehow being a good thing (check the mod posts on the Nest support forums - it’s laughable). That’s idiocy. My house’s coax cable conduit is exposed where it enters the house - it’s trivial to sneak-around the perimeter and snip the coax with a pair of kitchen scissors and then all of my Nest cameras are useless. Why can’t they be configured to save to my LAN’s NAS as a failover?
It sucks for me that the decision to shut down external access to the Nest API was made literally days after I dropped over $1500 on Nest kit - but since then I haven’t bought any more - I’ll be transitioning over to other brands that respect me as a consumer, instead of locking me in to their ecosystem of products designed around the demonstrably false assumption that a home’s internet connection is 100% available.
Everything google does on the home side just seems like pet projects that they abandon 2 years later as they consolidate and change names once again. Meanwhile, Amazon/Ring is killing it coming out with more models, sizes, colors, features, etc.
Hopefully this is a small enough partnership/stake to not torpedo the Samsung Smartthings / ADT partnership. I'm not a user of the latter, but appreciate the growing ecosystem.
I wonder what this says for the Google/Nest Security product future. The existing Nest Secure[0] is a well designed product, but also rather limiting (only one base unit, which is frustrating for houses with multiple entrances, or large houses). The Nest Secure was released ~3 years ago, and there have been some minor feature improvements, but no hardware additions or changes.
[0] https://store.google.com/us/product/nest_secure_alarm_system