Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by disillusioned 661 days ago
Unrelated, but similarly, I am in a weird form of hell in the Nest/Google Home ecosystem, where trying to re-add a camera to my home fails because it cannot successfully connect with the "assisting device" in my home to fetch the wifi credentials from.

When you attempt to connect it to a _new_/unrelated structure/home, it connects fine, because the phone sends that information to the camera directly. When you try to add it to your existing Nest home, it attempts to be "helpful" by connecting it with an "assisting device," and invariably fails.

It fails with an arcane NC013 or NC024 error, and instead of falling back to a manual setup option, it just... cannot be added. They legitimately suggest that you add it to a new "structure" (which operates under a separate Nest Aware subscription), and then migrate all of the other devices over to the new structure. Which isn't reasonable, when I have a dozen of these things, some of which are mounted in very out of the way places.

And worse, it can still fail, randomly.

It's as if the "Nest network" becomes corrupted in some indecipherable way. This was exacerbated by Google murdering dead my Nest Secure alarm system, which was _also_ an assisting device, which took my locks offline. And when they shipped a Nest Connect wifi adapter, I _also_ couldn't onboard _that_ device to the home for the same reason, so I now have a separate structure called "Connect", which features... just my locks. And now, the camera I was trying to add back.

It's absolute unforced errors and complete madness.

My experience building out a Sonos system for onboarding wasn't too bad, but I have had Sonos Amps fall offline and do weird things, and it personally annoys me that TruePlay doesn't work on Android. This shift to a new app that doesn't hit parity, and seems to do the original things the S2 app did markedly worse... woof.

1 comments

I’ve also burned my Google system.

In my case, I use a Google Apps email account so my family has a shared email domain (and I can better handle tech support and manage my kids’ use). That’s slowly become completely incompatible with nest and any consumer hardware or services, and that process of integration degradation was incredibly frustrating.

Google consumer software/hardware is dead to me now, I just can’t use it even if I weren’t holding a grudge.

Though it still has warts and opportunities for improvement, our house mostly runs on Unifi (for networking and security cameras.)