[floundy]

I think smartphones are the one exception as a "necessary evil" at this point in the first world.

However, we are talking about a thermostat here. When I bought my house, there were 40+ year old mechanical thermostats on the wall. I swapped them out because they were ugly and not programmable. I put in "dumb" Honeywell thermostats that don't connect to the internet and don't require software updates. Possibly they'll be here in 40 years, though I wouldn't be surprised if some capacitor or something fails, maybe I'll only get 20 years out of them.

Anyway, as a long-time Google user I've just been through this cycle too many times, mostly with web and phone apps, to seriously invest in them. The convenience of having everything in one place, in Google's cloud, also needs to be weighed against the annoyance of migrating things and learning new features whenever they decide to kill something off. If Obsidian dies, I'll take my .md notes to another editor. When Google Keep dies, who knows if stuff will carry forward or break like the Notes->Keep transition did for me.