Walking Back My Google Smart Home Ambitions (Premium)

When we moved to Pennsylvania almost three years ago, I viewed this change as an opportunity to start over in many areas. Among them was our approach to smart home technology, a move we’ve made in fits and starts over time. That was by design: As I noted upfront, I knew we’d make mistakes, and that we would go down certain roads only to backtrack after things didn’t work out.

The overall results aren’t all that impressive if you’re looking for the home of the future. We’ve only sporadically installed smart home tech around this Pennsylvania home in part because of surveillance worries and in part because a lot of this technology is simply too new and too untested to trust. Our biggest changes were infrastructure-based. We completely rewired and modernized the home’s electrical system, at great cost. We adopted mesh networking for whole-house Internet coverage. And we settled on Google as our smart home platform (as opposed to, say, Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri/HomeKit).

The Google choice was pragmatic: Of those three providers and also-ran pretenders like Samsung and Microsoft, only Google had (and has) all the pieces in place to be successful, including its AI and machine learning expertise and its global presence and automatic deployment via Android, the world’s most successful personal computing platform. Google, most assuredly, I figured, would overtake Amazon to become the world’s leading smart home platform.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, of course. Instead, Amazon has aggressively defended its market power by releasing an astonishing array of new devices and services each fall. And Google has, well, dropped the ball. There are new products each year, but only a few, and the firm just doesn’t seem to have its head in this game. For some reason.

That doesn’t bother me either way. I’m not really a huge Google fan per se, and it’s easy and even inexpensive to move between smartphone platforms because this market is decidedly unsticky and (at least ad-hoc) standards-based. (This softens the blow, I hope, for Cortana fans.)

Anyway. The Google stuff has worked, sort of. But there have been issues.

The first, of course, was that Google unceremoniously dropped its excellent Chromecast Audio dongle, and while my initial reaction was to buy an extra one just in case, I’m now wondering if this wasn’t related to the Sonos lawsuit, in which that company charged Google with copying its proprietary technology. Regardless of that, I started experiencing connectivity issues with the Chromecast Audio last year, and I think I’m right to be worried that these issues will now never be really fixed.

Separately from that, we also added some Google Home and Home Mini speakers to the mix over time, and their usage multiplied when Google added stereo pairing support. So we had two Google Homes in the kitchen in a pair and two in the living room as a separate pair. We also have two Lenovo-branded but G...