Sure, if you are the type of person who can stand the “wait and see” scenario. But for OCD people like me, the “wait” part drives us crazy. lol
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As official as it can get…
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At least with the current state of things, Google seems confused about the complete definition of Home Automation.
True full automation should require little or no interaction beyond its initial setup.
Google seems to think that nearly every automation needs to start with a voice activated trigger, courtesy of Google Assistant.
Then their idea of an automation is a Routine, which is a sequence of actions. You build the sequence of actions, and assign a spoken phrase to trigger them. It’s a locked phrase, and doesn’t use any kind of logic to interpret what you’re asking for. You have to use the exact phrase. You might as well be using a button. Push the button and the sequence of actions happen. You can also use a alarm, (if you’ve installed Google Alarm on your device), but again that’s just a trigger.
That definition is missing most of what makes Home Automation… automated. Actions that can occur without human interaction, based on logic: taking actions based on meeting defined conditions and/or environmental or sensor device values going above/below thresholds, for example. And complex automations allow for a combination of numerous met conditions before an action is taken, and also different sets of actions that may be taken depending on which conditions are met or not, etc.
Google’s current suggestion for automations that don’t require voice input is to use IFTTT, which works for simplistic automations mostly based on a single condition or threshold. It’s also an extra link in the chain between the input and the device(s) that is/are part of the action(s). This is in contrast the Works with Nest API that allows direct bi-directional communication between another device or Home Automation hub and the Nest product.
I do appreciate having voice control over Nest products and the ability to query them. But I don’t use voice control that much in reality. So, what really bothers me is that with Google’s decision to shut down the Works with Nest API they simply direct developers to the Actions on Google Smart Home developer site.
Looking at that site, it appears that Google’s Smart Home Action’s API is only meant as an interface for the developer’s device(s) to be controlled by Google Assistant, and not as a way to request control of other devices linked to Google Assistant. Also, the “Works with Google Assistant” is not an API. It’s just a badge for products which have created Google Smart Home Actions which have been tested by Google and deemed worthy of being officially supported. So it is in no way a one-to-one replacement for the Works with Nest API.
So unless I’m missing something, Google Assistant’s Smart Home functionality is missing a few large pieces of what’s required to complete the Home Automation puzzle. As far as I can see, at the moment, as of August, I will no longer be able to set up automations that tell my Nest product to do certain things based on logic using a variety of sensors / devices in my home and other external conditions, nor will I be able to set up automations based on input from my Nest product.
This is why I agree 100% with The Verge’s assertion that Google’s changes risk making the smart home a little dumber.
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I don’t know if they are confused, they emphasize on voice. Their new slogan is “Helpful Home” not automated home, just sayin’ I agree with you point of view, but I don’t think automation is what Google is targeting or advertising.
Looks like we will now get a few months of these “partners” trying to convince Alphabet/Google to give them the same access that the Alexa skill is getting… I guess that is one way to “shake things up”…
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This is such a 
storm of communications.
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Even if it might be taken out of context, what Nest’s boss said in an interview with Business Insider should make most of us reconsider investing in the new Google Nest products. When the problem comes from the top executive level, there isn’t much hope for anything else:
“Part of this is making us rethink decisions
we’ve made in the past,” Chandra said. “[Moving
forward] we’re not going to allow the owner
dictate how our products work.”
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Yep. They have taken a really big hit on the nestcams stories even though in that case it was user error.
In Europe, a lot of the regulation is designed around the philosophy that it should not be possible for the customer to harm themselves with the product.
In the US, a lot of regulation is designed around the philosophy that the customer should be warned that certain activities might allow themselves to harm themselves with the product.
These are very different in practice when it comes to both engineering and interface design.
As we already mentioned, Google has had to pay very large fines, some in the billions of dollars, in the EU in the last couple of years, and they haven’t even gotten around to looking at privacy yet.
I think they’ve decided if they want to sell into the EU market, they need to follow the EU consumer protection policies more closely. So that means cutting off a lot of feature options that were previously available.
When you think about it, it’s similar to what Samsung has done with regard to arming/disarming the security features of smartthings, including even unlocking a lock, in the design of the V3 app versus the V2 classic app.
FAQ: Why can’t I use Geopresence or an Automation to set the alarm state in the new (V3) app?
So I don’t think these features are coming back to google. There will always be a few companies which have a more open philosophy, but there’s just too much business strategy based on liability risk reduction for everyone to leave it open.
I’ve previously mentioned the example of childproof caps on prescription medications in the US. Once they made it a law that all the prescriptions had to have these caps, they then discovered that there was a fairly large population of disabled and elderly people who couldn’t get their medication bottles open!
So they modified the laws to allow you to individually request “easy open” caps when you place the prescription order. That worked OK for a couple of years.
But then “best practices” changed again so that now most of the mail order pharmacies ship the medication in a bottle with a child lock Installed, and a means of disabling the child lock after you get the bottle if you want it to be easy open.
The problem with that is it means that people like me have to have someone else set up the Cap the first time after the package arrives before the bottle can be opened. It can be quite annoying. but “safety first“ and all that. 
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More and more it seems that good people are punished for the actions of a few bad/stupid people.
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Don’t blame stupid people - blame their greedy class action lawyers.
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That could certainly be true for the US, but not for the UK or EU. It’s not class action lawsuits there that are driving these changes: it’s government regulations. And fines. Which are way more than any class action suit in the US.
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I said “bad/stupid”. I believe that covers lawyers too.
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My view is the security/privacy is their hoax. The real issue is a cloud strategy for integration is not scalable or affordable.
They were losing $$ on each unit because of the cloud API activity, and it was only getting worse as more usage of their API occurred. They really need a local API, but this does not fit their strategy that they know as much as they can about you to guide their advertising and attempt to drive the purchases.
I do think this is a crass land grab, in their case they think it is land that they own (regardless of the fact that someone should file a class action against them demanding rebate/refunds to everyone who bought based on “work with…” claims). It would be a great test of can cloud providers bait and switch at will.
This will narrow innovation on their platform, and I hope it fails miserably for them.
They do not have a plan for automation, but for “remote control” - either voice, or other very simplistic means.
Separately, I think all vendors that do a cloud API for device interrogation and control are going to fail - the architecture is just broken (in scale, and economics). So expect us to see every cloud based API go away and only local control (or cloud redirect to local) to survive.
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You vastly overestimate the cost of cloud computing. For Google, it is pennies per year per customer.
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Hopefully enough people drop their pricey cloud subscriptions so they can get the message that you can’t change the rules after the game starts, without consequences.
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Lots of cloud-based systems are very successful, Including most voice assistants such as Siri, Google assistant, echo… Google nest isn’t dropping the cloud. They’re just dropping most third-party integrations to the cloud because they can’t control those, But they know they are still going to be held responsible for them.
The head of the initiative got geeky enough that I think it’s real. He says “there’s no TOS when you enter a house.” They’re worried about the liabilities of what visitors, kids, And even inattentive device owners can cause to happen.
I’m not saying they don’t don’t want to mine as much data as they can, because they do. I’m not saying I trust any of their privacy promises, because I don’t. But I think this move is all about keeping control of the cloud, and avoiding more of the fines they’ve been paying in the EU, not about the costs of the cloud architecture itself.
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