I've been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. Just moved into a new house. I had gone all-in on Amazon in my old house: Ring security, Alexa, etc. Overall I regretted it; Amazon didn't seem to do much of a job of integrating things, of any sort of 'gestalt' of the house --- for example, they bought two different security companies that continue to be completely separate (Ring, Blink --- I had used blink, ultimately went over to ring). They shipped out stuff that wasn't really ready and then didn't support it (Fire TV Recast DVR). They increasingly pushed adverts everywhere, I constantly fought my Echo show devices to not have to see stuff that I didn't want so finally gave up on anything with a video screen component.
I have Google One or premium or whatever via my son-in-law and he had Google throughout his house and was happy with it, so I started fresh in this new house with Google. Even to the point of somewhat dumbing down from my ASUS router to use Google's latest version.
I'm doing my best this time not to get locked into standards that might die soon: I wired in z-wave light switches in a lot of places in the old house, and matter/thread seems to be the (current) future.
So I'm sticking for now with JUST google devices and leviton switches/plugs. Well, my new washer and dryer are GE so I added their app in too. Given the TP-Link stories recently I've been paying more attention now to all of the various mainland Chinese firms selling stuff. The hardware often works great, but I'm leery of any of their apps on my phone now.
So far besides the router I have a few google speakers, have set up one wired camera and have one each Leviton plug and switch. Unfortunately Google had a system-wide hiccup w.r.t. Google Assistant recently which made this all a bit more confusing for me, but hopefully that sort of thing is rare (?). There's also some confusion in terms of Nest vs. Google and more recently the messy and doubtless to-be long drawn out transition from Google Assistant to Gemini, but hopefully the end result will be nice.
I basically gave up on the idea of privacy, preferring now to try to limit somewhat how much privacy I lose to too many different firms. I was already using gmail, youtube & youtube music, google maps --- so I figured there's little additional loss of privacy going all-in on Google this time. Amazon for me is now mostly just a shopping site.
Some things I've learned recently:
- Ring security doesn't seem to have thought of a homeowner passing their gear on to a new owner. When I disconnected myself from that system my external wired-in cameras and doorbell all entered setup mode and constantly blink. Marvelous to have a security camera over my garage door flashing constantly with an empty house, sort of an advertisement that says "something interesting here, take a look". I turned off the circuit to that camera for now, not sure what I'll do before the house sells, or how well that will work for a prospective buyer. Maybe I'll end up having to rip it all out and do some re-wiring. Something to think about when wiring in smart devices.
- I had assumed that hard-wired ethernet is always the way to go, so in my new house I recently spent a lot of time mapping coax and cat5e, and converting cat5e cables that had been used as phone lines to put in ethernet wall plates to connect to those instead. Turned out that with Google's WiFi 6E mesh system I was getting exactly the same download/upload speed at a mesh node with or without wired backhaul. I'll still keep wired backhaul for one of the nodes but won't bother with the other as it's sort of unsightly in that location. I guess it's nice to have ethernet plates in various places in the house; there are some devices that require a wired connection and the Google mesh nodes each provide just one ethernet output (though of course one could attach that to a switch).
- Per above, stick to a very limited number of providers, and now if it requires an app (and so very often it does require an app) I'll avoid quite a number of brands that are ultimately Chinese companies. Don't get me wrong, I like Chinese people and culture, I'm just not keen on the current government in Beijing:
The Government May Ban TP-Link Routers This Year. How Worried Should You Be?