I upgraded my Vera lite to Vera Plus. In reinstalling all my Nest thermostat i had issues. After 2 days of trying different things I called Vera Support. The Tech told me that as of August 31, 2019 Google disassociated themselves with Vera. That means no more adding a Nest thermostat. There goes 250.00. Apparently Google is working on their own hub and we lose that thermostat off the list. I didn’t see any posts or tweets from Vera telling this was or did happen. Anyone else hear anything?
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Yes this was communicated and discussed here. WWN api was obsoleted and no longer accepts new device registrations. Google has decided they are big enough to create their own proprietary eco system and has been a pain to integrate. The natural reaction for me was to start a “google be gone” project.
There a lot of better choices for thermostats. Aside from the API and plugin issues, these thermostats have some interesting bugs, and I can attribute the demise of at least one control board in my HVAC unit to the way the thermostat handles power (my tip to those who may plan on continuing to use a Nest thermostat: do not run it without a “C” wire for a solid, valid common on the power side).
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Indeed there are much better thermostats choices out there. I chose the remotec zts-500 but it was not the only one. Centralite has a zigbee one which I seriously considered.
The two main issues: cloud dependance which is a characteristic but not unique to the google/nest devices but nevertheless to be avoided if you want something sustainable and reliable. It is unfortunately a trend we have seen over the past couple of years.
The second issue is my experience and now my analysis of google’s overall business model. My line of work is in both engineering and marketing in high tech. I can attest very clearly that google users are not google customers. Users are products google sell to their true customers and we as users are foolish enough to pay to become their products, giving them our data and absorbing their ads amongst other things. The result is product obsolescence, ignoring of customers’ interest and requests if it doesn’t benefit their business interests, increasing intrusion of privacy and security… and the list goes on. Yes they offer some great services but at what true cost? At the end they still are a business with a business model and part of it is to make believe that the general public is their customers.
The tech was actually kind to google.
Google shut down new access to the “works with nest” cloud servers for everybody. IFTTT was cut off. Manufacturers with their own clouds were cut off.
There were some manufacturers which had just gotten certified Works with Nest but hadn’t got to announce it before google announced the shut down. Let that percolate. Google let manufacturers waste effort going through “works with nest” certification and killed the program before they could leverage it.
Never buy products that NEED the cloud.
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It’s getting harder and harder.
We get more choices of cloud dependent devices indeed but it doesn’t mean that the cloud independent ones are less available. Actually they are increasingly available too but not as widely marketed and not increasing in numbers at the same rate. We just have to be selective in what we buy and not get tempted by the walmart fire sale.
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