[HomeGear]

No.

Google’s hardware is lackluster, their services come and go and are bloated with telemetry, their search is worse than ever, there’s no live customer support person to talk with in the event of a problem, and there’s no unified vision.

Engineering is good, leadership is abysmal.

[nullgeo]

Every year I scan through their Google I/O website to see if anything catches my eyes, not many things they're presenting catch my eyes. I did look at Flutter 3, but probably won't try it out.

And the Google hardware ecosystem just does not appeal to me.

[saidinesh5]

Their hardware used to be good though.

Nexus 7, Nexus 5 were good unlocked, inexpensive devices. After that i really hoped their project Ara (block phone) to take off but they abandoned it.

[lodovic]

Only the Chromecast is interesting, but that is really becoming less and less every day due to their aggressive advertising.

[mattbrewsbytes]

Being kind of a cheapskate, I've tried chromecast and the Amazon one and then bought an AppleTV device. I haven't had issues like I did with other dongle-like devices with having to restart them when there was a hiccup or crash of some kind - which is especially annoying when watching live sports.

I now have two AppleTV devices

(I use the word 'device' because they also have a streaming product called AppleTV+, which btw has some really good shows, and I think you can get the streaming service w/o the device)

[rightbyte]

I am still pissed off since buying a Chromecast just to realize there was no way to watch videos on a harddrive on the home network.

[ngrost24]

You might want to check Videostream for Chromecast ? There's both a mobile app that links to your PC and also a desktop app. Last time I checked, VLC also allowed casting of videos on your PC(although iirc was more iffy with subtitles, etc) though not sure if there's mobile support, and I believe there are also other paid apps that can be used to cast videos. If you're referring to seeing videos directly from a hard drive without a PC, a TV with usb support should take care of that (long time ago, I had even a Bluray player that had usb and was used in similar fashion to cast videos from a usb flash drive)

[rightbyte]

At the time, like 4 years ago, I could make nothing work except poor screencasts. That functionality should be native.

It is easier to just plug a laptop into the TV than using a Chromecast.

Maybe I should give it another try.

[marak830]

On my PC I can open chrome and stream to the Chromecast on my network. I drag videos from the desktop onto chrome and it plays fine.

Only reason I have chrome installed lol.

[Raphael]

BubbleUPnP for DLNA/Chromecast

[sofixa]

> there’s no live customer support person to talk with in the event of a problem

There is, if you own a Pixel or pay for it (Google One, combines extra Google Drive/GMail storage and customer support). It's not great that you have to pay for it, but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user.

Are there many companies that operate under a freemium/freeware business model that provide free support to anyone?

[he_is_legend]

> but at Google's scale it doesn't really make sense, purely financially, the staffing required to support every free user.

This seems to get trotted out often whenever Google providing support gets mentioned. But I don't think anyone is asking Google to suddenly offer support for every customer question under the sun. Maybe they just need to provide a little support for some of the big problems: like algorithms banning people from all of the Google services that they have used for many years, for non-discernable reasons with zero comebacks. They spend plenty of money getting people on board their services (and extracting as much data as they can from them) but none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong.

[sofixa]

If they offer support for some cases, especially complicated cases like those, they'll get bombarded with all sorts of questions anyways (if you've never heard an IT person get asked about coffee machines "because they're tech" or to help out with somebody's personal phone/PC/whatever, i suggest you visit Reddit, more specifically r/sysadmin and r/talesfromtechsupport. It makes for fun, albeit sad reading.

And discarding that, it's a tough balancing act between helping users recover accounts without helping malicious actors takeover accounts and/or helping malicious actors keep malicious accounts. It'd take effort to train personnel and establish policies to do all that properly.

And regarding customer loyalty, why do you think Google care about that? It really doesn't seem like they do, and financially, their revenue per customer is negligible for that to make a difference.

[tmaly]

Why don't they just do something like that Whitehouse website where people can vote on things. If enough votes go to a particular issue, address it.

This would be a nice middle ground between no support and having to support everything.

[gerikson]

> none on retaining customer loyalty after an algorithm gets it wrong

Textbook monopoly.

[xmprt]

Google doesn't let you pay for support for a lot of their products even if you wanted to. The nail in the coffin for me is how YouTubers with millions of subscribers who generate thousands of dollars for Google can't even get good support themselves. The fact that these problems continue to happen year after year tells me that Google doesn't really care.

[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

A lot of people would send them a lot of money to fix their "freeware" problem. Especially if the system decided to destroy their existence. They just don't care. At their scale, you as an individual are to insignificant.

[kcexn]

The choice to provide support seems to be on an app by app basis. I get support for YT Premium, Google Pay, My Pixel, and all of my Google Home products. But I can't get support for Google Chrome for example.

The support I do get is excellent. I don't think I've ever been in a chat queue for longer than 5 minutes. And often they can resolve my problem.

Anything involving a warranty or out of warranty repair those has been painful for me because of third party repairers.

[dirtyid]

It's not great even if you pay for it.

This was the Google One support email I recieved for trying to cancel a Youtube premium sub on an account that got wiped for spams/scams that prevented access to the subscription page... which is another basket case of drama since the account doesn't post any content or interact with Youtube other than view videos. Just deleted out of the blue with no prior warning.

>We'd really love to help you regarding this concern, and I also can imagine how important this is to you. It's just that we don't have the proper training, or the updated knowledge (regarding this topic) for us to help you effectively.

Yeah. BTW this was from Youtube support after One support forwarded them the ticket. NVM they wiped all my uploaded music migrated from Google Music and 20 years of playlists. Even Google Takeout for services seem to be gone. Appeal was also denied without any explanation, so have to wait another couple weeks to try again.

[nicoburns]

> Are there many companies that operate under a freemium/freeware business model that provide free support to anyone?

Does it matter that it's freemium. Google make obscene profits. They have plenty of money to fund support if they wanted to.