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Google's increasingly prickly Android perception problem
(www.computerworld.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Android
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Google has a Google problem. Seemingly no one is steering the ship. They have a bunch of internal teams doing their own thing. How many messaging apps have they killed now, 3, 4? Allo was great. It worked on Android and iOS. I had all my friends on it and then Google canceled it. All they had to do was add sms fallback for android users, spent some money on marketing, and it could have rivaled iMessage by now. Before that, it was hangouts and regular people didn’t know about it. How many times do they think they can burn customers before people catch on?
Their pixel phones still don’t get the same amount of updates that iPhones do and iPhones retain their value for a lot longer than Android phones. Financially, it makes more sense for a parent to buy an iPhone. They can pass it down to their kid when they upgrade and know it’ll still get updates for a long time. Yes, Google can patch and update parts of the phone from the play store but good luck explaining that to regular people.
I have a lamp with two smart bulbs in it and I can’t combine them into 1 light in the google home app. The light bulbs are controlled independently. It’s infuriating.
I could rant for a long time but I’ll end with this; I don’t enjoy using iOS but my only other option is death by a thousand papercuts.
This is their biggest problem, They themselves fragment their user base. We were on hangouts, you could even get your google voice calls on it, we didnt' switch to allo or duo, till they announced they were retiring hangouts. And now all three are gone.
We stay away from Google now.
Hangouts was dope. With a Google voice number, you could also send text messages from your computer which was pretty novel for Android users at the time
It was novel for everyone at the time. Android had integrations with computers long before Apple did.
Samsung hardware and signal for texting have been perfect for me.
I have multiple lights in my living room and when I say "Ok Google, Turn on all lights in living room" it turns on all lights. The key is to have them in same room in Google Home app.
Yes, but what happens when you have one room with multiple light fixtures, each with multiple bulbs, and you want to manage them separately? This is relevant to me because I have a very long attic loft bedroom. If my wife is in bed at one end of the room and I'm on the computer at the other end, I want the lights at dim at my end and off at hers.
There are workarounds involving "automations" or tricks with naming conventions but they're very tedious and spotty. The ability to group bulbs together (which Phillips Hue offers) would be much cleaner.
You create a group in favourite and for lights you can add multiple lights to it. https://9to5google.com/2023/06/23/google-home-favorites-light-groups/
Couldn't you just make them into two rooms in the app? One for each side?
But then "turn on the lights" doesn't work. I've only got 1 speaker in the room. This would also fail if you had IoT lights in your nightstands and you wanted to control just the main (multi-light-fixture) light but not the nightstand lights, for example, which is specifically why I don't bother with IoT lights in nightstands and the like.
Oh gotcha
The solution is to name every light in the multi light fixture with the same name. For example I have an arc lamp with 3 bulbs all named "arc lamp" saying "hey Google arc lamp on" turns all 3 on.
The Alexa home app allows you to have groups of groups, so you can divide the room into separate groups, then combine them into one room group. This is what Google should be doing, pretty bad that Amazon of all people does this part of smart home management better when it's a relatively simple thing to do.
However you should be using automation from timers and sensors to turn lights on and off, the app or voice should only be needed on rare occasions. This is also something Google is shit at, I use home assistant to manage this (I have about 200 smart devices) but there are plenty of other options.
I hear what you are saying but what if I want to use the app because I’m trying to be quiet and not wake anyone?
What if I only want to turn on the lamp and not other lights?
What happens when I tell Google Assistant to turn on the lamp and for some reason, only 1 light bulb turns on?
What do mute people do if they can’t speak to the assistant?
You don’t have to answer any of that. My point is that, sure, there are workarounds but none of them really solve the issue and it ends up being just another papercut. For all of Apple’s faults, of which there are many, it feels like their engineers actually use their phones.
You can do it in the app too. All you need to do is create a group in your favourite's and for lights you can select multiple lights. https://9to5google.com/2023/06/23/google-home-favorites-light-groups/
From the Settings tab in the Google home app, I can create a speaker group with multiple speakers but I can’t create a light group.
In the Favorites tab in the Google Home app, I don’t see a way to create a group. I can add the “Living Room” lights group that’s already there but that controls my lamp and all the other lights in my living room.
As far as I can tell, the only way to natively combine more than 1 light to function as one device is to create a room and put those lights in that room. The command “turn on living room lamp” would work as intended but “turn on living room lights” would not.
Not sure why you cannot do it. But I can create groups in favourite's and can turn-on all of them in one click.
What steps do you take to create the group?
you can also say "turn on the lights" and it will toggle all the lights in whatever room it is in