This is almost certainly totally out of date.

Today, the confusing, intimidating pile of Google Messaging services is bigger than it has ever been, with Google Chat, Google Messages/RCS, Google Voice/Project Fi, and separate messaging services in Photos, Messages, Pay, Assistant, Stadia, Maps, and Phone.

• first three - still around
• Photos - yep
• Messages - duh
• Pay - I couldn’t tell you as moved out of Pay when Wallet rebranded to Pay and then Google inexplicably released a second app called Wallet
• Assistant - I think this technically doesn’t count since you can’t message people
• Stadia - RIP, thoughts and prayers to the five people who used it
• Maps - Took a bit of clicking around to find a business near me that used it, but, yeah. Still there.
• Phone - The most baffling thing on this list. Even ArsTechnica in the article doesn’t know if this is the same service as the above Maps chat or not. I’ve never seen this, so hopefully it was a short lived experiment that never took off… but maybe someone else here has seen it recently?

Welp, never mind, not that out of date.

These clowns want to push a messaging standard. Jump to RCS, Google says. Hey, Google. How about you standardize your shit first. Nearly all of these could be collapsed into a single messaging platform with little integrations into your other services via the Messages app (aka sent as links and displayed as integrations in compatible devices).

You’re telling me I can meet a potential partner, have video calls with them, get scammed out of money, and tweet about how sad I am, all from the same platform? Sign me up.

If the image link didn’t come in: here you go.

There’s also purchasable hardware that comes pre-installed with Home Assistant and has zigbee built-in, it looks like, which is neat (though expensive).

This is very true. It does look like they’ve made it much easier lately with pre-purchasable hardware though. I know that it’s a steep price compared to Google Home, but the advantage is that you’re not tied to a Google ecosystem which can just unexpectedly shut down at a moment’s notice. (Listen y’all I’m still mad about Google Inbox.)

Here you go: https://www.home-assistant.io/

You would need to do some pre-planning before going ahead with this and it’s not as simple as Google Home for sure. For example, my household went all in on Zigbee lights and switches so we had to get a Zigbee antenna to connect to our old laptop running Home Assistant and make sure all our cool LED smart lights and other cool gadgets were compatible, etc. I’m also tagging @ISometimesAdmin who did a lot of the networking stuff in case he wants to add anything.

I’m attaching an image of my dashboard setup for my room, just as an example of what can be accomplished. (This may not federate to Lemmy so I will self-reply with a link if necessary) This shows my and my household’s location, the downstairs Sensi thermometer climate (which can be controlled), the light controls, temperature/pressure/humidity which is a little Aqara sensor from Amazon, and the Air Quality comes from my Winix air filter which can also be integrated to Home Assistant. You can really do a lot.

Oh boy, I’m looking forward to going all in on Google Home only for it to be deprecated in three years!

(Hey folks, Home Assistant is pretty cool and you can run it locally on an old laptop.)

I’ve been using the Microsoft launcher for a while now and it’s nice, but laggy. And I had to finally uninstall the Bing browser app because it just wouldn’t stop crashing.

I still use nav buttons. I really liked apps that had that left slide out drawer (something Google pushed for a while and then quietly abandoned) and I kept navigating elsewhere while trying to pull out the menu drawers, so I went to buttons.

My final cool app with a drawer, rif is fun, is no longer on my phone, so I guess I can switch to navigation gestures… But it would take a lot of getting used to and “what gesture goes where?” (Note that I am particularly bad at remembering this sort of stuff - I’m the type of person who keeps a screenshot of a keybinding map on my second monitor while playing games.)

I used Chat the first time before they killed it, and then I switched to Hangouts which allowed SMS and chat which was very nice, and then I ignored Allo and Duo when they came out, and then Hangouts died and I went back to Messages and just stuck with RCS, and now what, Google wants me to go back to Chat?

Didn’t Hangouts work? Couldn’t we have just continued to improve on Hangouts? Oh, wait, that would require some actual commitment to this nightmare of an ecosystem.