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101

Google's increasingly prickly Android perception problem (www.computerworld.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (18 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.