[whatever1]

Btw Onhub does not even have a browser accessible interface like every router has. The only way to manage it is through the app (that they will decommission).

Reviewers and experts called this out at the time, but Google reassured that onhub will not face any issues since they will commit to long term support of the device. As a testament to that they highlighted the overspecification of the device (it had enormous ram and cpu overhead) that would allow it to continuously improve.

[chias]

Same with Google Wifi and Google Home Nest. Also, fun fact, during an internet outage some time ago I learned that your Google Wifi can't even route locally if you don't have a live connection to the internet. That is, my Desktop could not connect to my NAS -- both wired via Ethernet to my Google Wifi network -- because there was no Internet access.

This is a "feature", and is working as intended: https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1294819896019189761

Don't buy Google home networking equipment.

[boulos]

Disclosure: I used to work for Google and still work for Alphabet.

That response is a little confusing: the management app is Internet only, but it doesn't drop all its routing tables or something just because the uplink is gone. Moreover, the regular DHCP and so on will operate just fine while not connected to the internet.

I don't know what happened in your case and I totally agree that it's a bad experience for troubleshooting (the thing even has some weird API on it [1], so why isn't there some basic web-based management tool), but you can absolutely unplug the uplink and packets flow locally.

[1] https://github.com/olssonm/google-wifi-api

[chias]

We had also had a power outage, which I suspect caused it to lose it's routing tables for some reason. Power was out for about a week, internet was out for about three weeks. When power came back, the Google WiFi was essentially a fancy brick with LEDs until the internet came back too.

Luckily I had a ~15 year old Cisco router I could temporarily replace it with.

[charcircuit]

Don't misrepresent them. It's a limitation. Not a feature.

[jjav]

Phone apps (and the mobile OSs they run on) have a very limited support lifetime. What phone apps from even a decade ago still run if unmaintained? Or are even available?

No non-disposable hardware should ever depend on a phone app, lest it become equally disposable.

All my electronics and computers from the 80s and 90s run just fine today! In great part because they don't depend on anything.

Electronics from the 2020s are unlikely to be usable in the 2060s simply due to unnecessary dependencies, even if the hardware itself is totally fine. Don't buy things like that.

[Ekaros]

Reminds me of sous vide and Joule compared to competitors. Ofc, sleek nice clean small design is nice. But only to be able to use with app... Just no. I can get those features and physical controls as well. Albeit touch screen which responses to water drops on machine usually dealing with some amount of condensation near it...

Yeah, I won't touch anything that doesn't have basic controls as physical.

[vel0city]

Phone apps eventually failing to work is incredibly frustrating. I own several overall pretty simple Android games which were delivered as APKs which don't run on modern Android. With API targets constantly changing underneath its impossible for even somewhat basic apps to stay functional after a few generations of OS.

[reaperducer]

Onhub does not even have a browser accessible interface like every router has

I know some people who didn't jump onto Airports because of this. If this is important to you, avoid Amazon's eero line, as well.

[waych]

Unlike Google's wifi products, all the eeros I own, including the first generation versions, still regularly get updated and are still supported. They also still function when newer revisions are added to the mesh.

[bubblethink]

Google routers are much worse than other products like chromebooks or pixels because there is no community for flashing, say, openwrt, on these devices. This may be due to the blob situation for APs, which tends to be pretty garbage in general irrespective of vendors.