by Peter Topolewski
Imagine you could you travel back in time with your phone. Imagine you presented your phone to the first stranger you encountered. Didn’t dilly dally at all but straightaway showed this lucky stranger the Google Home app. How far back in time would you have to travel to ensure the app didn’t make one bit of sense to the stranger?
The 1940s?
Doubtful. The TV screen, though not yet in wide use, existed and set a high bar in the imaginations of who saw or even heard of such a thing.
The 1840s? Most certainly. Sure, Google Home is mostly colored icons, but to a citizen of the world of 1840—where and when electric power is not yet present—a glass-faced notepad with moving, colored icons would look like magic.
For those not in the know, the colored icons of Google Home exist in service of “setting up, managing, and controlling compatible Google and third-party smart home devices.” Apple users undoubtedly roll their eyes at this point, but they have their own version, smartly called Home. It works with Apple and Apple-adjacent products.
The purpose of setting up this Google (or Apple) app is to create a home partially or fully stuffed with lights, thermostats, speakers, and cameras you control from anywhere, anytime. Using your phone.
If all goes well, the results will be magical, even to present-day folks, never mind those of the 1840s.
Too bad the app—and the entire enterprise of setting up, managing, and controlling devices connected to it—is awful.
Here are three of the myriad examples how.
First, Google speakers interact with Google Home using Wi-Fi. You have the option to set up two Google speakers to play in stereo (audiophiles know what this means). For built-in convenience, modern Wi-Fi networks have devices automatically connect to the strongest (not the closest source of a) signal in your network. This means that sometimes—scratch that, oftentimes—each speaker in your pair will connect to a different point (or node) in the network. When that happens, the music you play on them sounds great… until it drops in and out. Incessantly.
Second, attempts to resolve such an issue (the existence of which is not, by the way, hinted at in any documentation) very likely will entail adding and deleting your speakers from the app, setting up and re-setting up pairs of them, and finally naming and renaming those pairs. Though you will have deleted all but the last named pair from Google Home, all the names can still be found in the app. You might not see them at first, but they’re there. And though that pair no longer exists, there, under an option to assign a device to any room in your house, you will see them listed. Forever. Forever. Unless you delete the app itself from your phone and set up everything from scratch. Note, this is an official solution frequently suggested for just about every Google Home problem you’ll encounter.
Third, if instead of setting up your two speakers in stereo and you opt for having each play exactly the same audio together, they sometimes work more reliably on today’s multi-point Wi-Fi networks. Problem partly solved? Sure, except when you open your music app and decide to remove the next song in your playlist. Maybe it has a bit of colorful language you don’t want the kiddies to hear. Or maybe you’re just done with it after playing it twenty times a day all summer long. But, what’s this, no matter how many times you swipe right to delete the song, within seconds it reappears, exactly where it was.
Frustrating is a word that doesn’t begin to cover it. Yet if we assume the goodwill of all people, Google Home was built in earnest. And if we grant the neutrality of corporations—a naïve and dangerous proposition—we can at least leave open the reason Google Home exists. (Hint: Google wants to live in your home.)
Motives good or grave, the result doesn’t change.
Once you embark on and persist in installing Google Home, you enter a special world. The level of expertise assumed, nay demanded, of such a task will either bury or delight you. Who, after all, can take a neutral stand on software versions and MAC addresses? What might get you, though, is the nonchalance of the documentation. If not that, then the app’s maze of menus and the error messages—those that fit on screen and are not cut off mid-sentence—that beseech you to try again later.
Add it all up, and your Google Home adventure is akin to buying ignition and fuel systems from Ford and expecting to assemble a functioning Mustang by this afternoon.
Struggle on, bold member of modernity. Get Google Home partly or fully installed, and from that moment forward you interact with your abode the same way you interact with the automated phone system at your bank.
No surprise, then, that problems with Google Home consume vast swaths of human energy. Fiddling with in-app options, unplugging and plugging in devices, repositioning devices, pushing toothpicks into tiny holes to execute factory resets. This is time that could have been spent exercising, learning a new language, having sex, ladling soup at a soup kitchen.
Users—that’s us—instead dedicate our most precious commodity to not only messing about with this unholy marriage of hardware and software. We also waste it away documenting the intricacies of speakers that cut out, lights that won’t turn off, security cameras that won’t turn on. We continue, querying others about all the above, then—when a tease of an answer appears in one of countless online threads—pleading for follow-up replies that might yet solve our particular configuration, our deepest of dilemmas.
It’s all worth it.
The hours and days of toil. The cursing that makes family members and guests uncomfortable. The cold sweats in the middle of the night, brought on by unwelcome guesses about why your smart doorbell isn’t functioning properly. The gigabytes of user-written instructions typed and videoed and uploaded and duplicated until they consume terabytes of storage space around the world.
It’s all worth it, when it works, when your speakers play in glorious stereo, when you can turn on your bedroom light from across town, when you can see your porch from the comfort of your bed. In your glorious home.
The elation goes a little sideways, though, when your security camera catches a stooped trio outside, dragging the entirety of their possessions down the block, skidding along their plastic bins and a rollie cart with a cockeyed axle, stopping briefly to fire up a glass pipe. No Google Home for them.
The utility of the security cameras fades a bit when you realize they didn’t hold the fort for anyone when Hamas attacked on October 7th. The luster comes off when you read in the New York Times about Omar al-Far, a Palestinian trapped wandering in his own country. “You need to take any pieces of metal from your home so you can use them later to build a tent,” he says. No security cameras or wireless speakers for Omar. Even if he got them working, what’s the point? One day he lives by a pile of rubble, another beside a landfill. Google Home doesn’t keep the Israeli bombs from falling.
The addicts living on your city streets. The Palestinians dodging explosions and searching for U.N. food drops. The Ukrainian families cowering while air-raid sirens scream. They don’t contribute to the Google Home user forums. They don’t even read them. The inscrutable logic of a device automations and the pop-up error messages from smart thermostats don’t mean a thing. The only thing remotely similar that matters is a signal connecting them to a network.
With a connection, Ukrainian soldiers can fly drones that might keep their land free another day. Residents of Darfur can learn where to line up for a meal, even if it is animal feed. The addicts outside your door can connect to government services that might give them a bed for the night, or more importantly to their dealer for a hit before their bodies are taken over by the pain of withdrawal.
It’d be nice for them if Google had a service that helped with any of this. Wouldn’t it be nice for all of us? Wouldn’t it, in fact, be like magic?
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