The untold story of Google I/O 2019 - The irresponsible attempt to kill "Works with Nest"

Devices & Integrations Connected Things
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The WeMo notice which just went out:

Wemo + Works with Nest is winding down
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You may have seen recent announcements from Google announcing changes to Nest. Google will be winding down the Works with Nest program and unifying the experience through the Works with
Google Assistant program.
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What does that mean to you and your Wemo devices that work with Nest?
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On August 26th all Wemo and Works with Nest integrations will be discontinued, meaning you can no longer access or control your Nest thermostat through the Wemo app or use the Nest “home” and “away” feature to automatically control Wemo devices. The good news is, you can still use the Works with Google Assistant program to connect your Wemo devices and set smart home automated actions with Google Assistant. You can also take advantage of Google Assistant Routines, which can be set up in the Assistant or Google Home apps. These routines can be used with Wemo products to help streamline your home automation.
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More information about the changes to Nest can be found on their FAQ page.
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You may also reach our to our customer support team at 1-844-745-WEMOor on Twitter @WEMOCares.
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Thank you for being a part of the Wemo family.
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Sincerely,
Team Wemo

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187

I think this was their decision to stop maintaining the Nest API integration and took the easy way out to just keep the Google Home integration. But other “Works with Nest” partners are still waiting to hear back from Google Nest about the camera integration, for example.

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188

The unofficial rumor is also that WeMo wanted to give customers at least a month’s notice.

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Atmos Home is certainly affected, but since they are desperate to retain customers (still pre-delivery… and late, late…), they are pretending nothing is to worry.

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Thought I would enter my experience here - I took the plunge and voluntarily migrated to Google Home from Nest… as sort of a one-way experiment. I am a heavy IoT experimenter, so I thought my travels through the looking glass might answer questions for folks that I never saw answered anywhere else.

First off, not to be a Google apologist, but - I do understand their motivation here, and it does not seem to be entirely based on an ecosystem lock-in as some folks are saying. It does, in fact, seem to be a decision based off of legit security concerns to having an open API. I do feel that the upcoming Works with Google Home (or whatever they are calling it) API will be a locked down version of what we have seen with WWN APIs.

My setup is this:

  • about 150 devices hanging off of SmartThings (these include lutron switches, Keen vents, AxisGear shades, and a few non-LIFX colored bulbs
  • about 25 devices on LIFX
  • about 10 devices on Harmony
  • 7 Sonos Devices
  • Ecobee 4 with room sensors
  • 6 Nest Cams
  • A Ring Doorbell and Chimes
  • An Ambient Weather compatible weather staton

I do a few dozen actions through SmartThings, IFTTT and Yonomi - and try to have ST be the hub for most things. I do a lot of personal coding in the ST dev interface, and have started using WebCore more and more for complex actions. (I really dig WebCore). For Nest sensor monitoring in ST I have been using the NST Manager app.

So, some of my concerns before I started revolved around the question: “can I still use the GA voice assistant to communicate remote commands and simple routines to my ST, LIFX and Harmony devices after I merge accounts?” Strangely, I could never, ever find the answer to that simple question in this or any other online community. (Spoliler alert: Yes you can.)

As I started to look at my home, I began to realize that a lot of actions I had been relying on IFTTT and Yonomi for were now available elsewhere. Sonos and GA just started playing together well, so I could eliminate my recipes in IFTTT and Yonomi that did all of those actions…things like that.

The big realization was: (a) I don’t have a Nest thermostat any more after moving to Ecobee last year and (b) I never use the Nest cams as trigger sensors. (I used to, but I found the results to have too many false positives - so I bought standard motion sensors.) and finally, © my back yard weather station provides me with better info than Nest Weather.

So - after some cleanup (I now let GA talk directly to harmony to control my media center, fireplace, etc instead of going through IFTTT.) I was ready to do this thing…

…I did the thing.

End result: absolutely no loss of any functionality in my house at all. The things that need to communicate through GA do, the rest go to ST, IFTTT and Yonomi.

So - if you are in a similar situation and you really do not use any Nest products for sensor input into the rest of your home… just go ahead and merge. Everything will be fine.

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Yes, it’s a total jackass move and impossible to understand really!

Glad Neostat is working well for you, I feel like it’s a much safer setup than one which needs CloudX to talk to CloudY.

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Good for you, really. You were smarter than most reading this thread that Nest Thermostat is not the best choice. Unfortunately, think for a second how would you feel if Ecobee comes out tomorrow and says, you are no longer able to use your thermostat with your Keen vents.

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Oh yeah - I get it. We’re all depending on everyone’s good graces here…but that’s true for all inter-corporate integrations of all types, not just IoT stuff.

BTW, I don’t use the Ecobee-Keen direct integration, I use the ST hub to connect the two and run it with yracine’s “MyEcobee” smartapp. I just like the flexibility that yracine’s stuff gives me.

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Oh btw? It wasn’t due to any smart anticipation on my part. When I made the decision, Ecobee had remote room sensors and Nest did not - and the integration with the Keen vents was tighter. So I just made the call to bite the bullet and rip out the Nest and slap in the Ecobee. It just worked out :wink:

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Ha, when I made the jump from a Z-Wave thermostat to Nest, it was because they had room sensors and was able to keep the same tight integration with Keen vents as I had with the Z-Wave thermostat. In the hindsight, I should have went with Ecobee lol…

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but with smartthings and a zwave tstat its easy and cheaper to add room sensors than it is to buy a nest or Ecobee. One less IDE to be dependent on…

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For all Nest (thermostat) haters - after Google made the change - I must tell you that jumping to Ecobee is like hitting a gold mine. I cannot belive I held on to my beloved Nest thermostat and ignored the Ecobee for this long. The Ecobee is by far a better choice. If you don’t like how Google is treating you, jump to Ecobee the benefits are incomparable. You can actually use the room sensors, you can actually schedule mode changes, you can actually get meaningful reports. The flexibility of the settings make you feel like you are free again :slight_smile:

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That’s what I’ve been saying for more than 4 years to those Nest lovers. … They don’t know what they are missing… But they don’t see it even with the best explanations…

Regards

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So hard to believe people don’t listen to you when you are so patient and polite with your posts :smirk:.

You had some Nest lovers pay for your Nest apps right.

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Yes, I had to develop my own version of the Nest integration because the other one was causing me issues in my zoning smartapps due to the fact that it was not following the Smarthings standard capabilities…I had to explain to the authors the difference between thermostatFanMode and thermostatOperatingState… It’s all noted in their github’s long list of issues.

It took me about a week of my Christmas vacation in 2018 to develop the full Nest implementation (tstat, protect, cam)…

I didn’t have to install any Nest thermostat or protects at my home to do it as everything was tested through the excellent Nest simulator…

Yeah, that was easy peasy to develop a better and more resilient implementation… My Nest contributors were quite happy with it…

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For people who followed this thread, Google has heard loud and clear the strong consumer response against killing the Works With Nest program:

Michele Turner, the senior director of Google’s smart home ecosystem: “I think the the frustrating pieces that we did not have the routines and automations in place for people to be able to cut over to,” she says. “And yeah, we underestimated the reaction a bit, to be totally honest with you.”

Also…

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I found it interesting on her interview with Stacy on IoT that presence detection was one of the main reasons for killing WWN. So i assume the Nest Thermostat presence detection will not be exposed through their new API.

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They don’t want to take responsibility of sharing with 3rd parties the knowledge of when the owner is home or away. So likely, you will be able to set an Assistant routine by telling Google that you are leaving but the home status will not be shared with anyone.

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@HA_fanatic
I cannot speak of personal experience of Ecobee only of Nest. The reason I cannot speak from personal experience of Ecobee is that sadly they seem to be run by xenophobic flat earthers who are unaware that the world is round and life including intelligent life exists outside the USA. (We even have ‘electricity’ and this new fangled thing called ‘The Internet’!)

Based on what we hear happening in the wild west I would be happy to accept that the Ecobee thermostat family is superior to the Nest Thermostat. In the absence of Ecobee I already have plans to switch away from the Nest Thermostat v3 to Tado.

However I do still regard the Nest Protect as by far the best in class for smoke detectors. (Again this is aided by the fact that most of their competitors think they will drop off the edge of the world if they leave the USA.)

discworld
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Ecobee is based in Canada :canada: (Toronto).

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