IoT and home automation is turning out to be a pretty big connectivity mess.
I've got about 60 Google devices in my house including Chromecast Audio,
Chromecast Ultra and Google Home, but the UX for connecting with them
through Pandora, Spotify and even the Google Home app is terrible.
When I want to get music playing on my house audio system, it shouldn't be
this difficult -but usually the process goes something like this:
(1) Open up "Apps" under my phone settings and force Home, Spotify and
Pandora all to stop (the only way I know to "reset" them).
(2) Turn off WiFi, then turn WiFi back on again.
(3) Open the app you want to use (Spotify/Pandora).
(4) Open up whatever you're trying to play
(5) Try to use the cast button to play it on something else (sometimes it
needs several minutes after reconnecting to WiFi to realize that there are
devices there waiting for you, and sometimes it won't recognize them until
I reboot the phone).
(6) Scroll through a really poorly organized list of devices to try to
find the one you're trying to play to.
(7) Maybe it plays, but if you're walking around the house and your phone
moves from one Wireless Access Point (WAP) to another, then it often drops
the connection. For me this does one of 2 things:
--It might keep playing indefinitely on the Chromecast device(s) I had
selected before the connection was lost, but the control over the
track/volume is lost. I'll need to try to reconnect again, which may or
may not work without repeating steps 1-6. Often, when it reconnects, it
interrupts the music that was playing by skipping to the next track.
Sometimes when this connection is lost, it will simultaneously play on both
the Chromecast devices, and start a new, different song on my phone.
--It stops playing on the Chromecast device(s) and starts playing on my
phone instead (I am most annoyed by this outcome).
(8) If you've started it playing from your phone, and you then open it on
your desktop, you can sometimes control it from your desktop. The
advantage here is that your desktop isn't going to be moving around the
house with you as much as your phone probably will -so you should be able
to maintain connected more easily.
Really frustrating things that I wish Spotify/Pandora/Google would fix:
(1) Where the list of available devices is shown, do the following:
--Condense the size of each item when there are more than 10 available so
that people don't need to scroll as much to see everything.
--Remember which devices/groups you last cast to and put those at the top
of the list.
--Organize the rest of the list alpha-numerically instead of randomly so
that people don't need to do a scavenger hunt each time they're scrolling
around a list of devices/groups trying to find the one they're looking for.
(2) Fix or add an musical alarm clock:
--Pandora has an alarm clock feature, but it is completely unreliable and
can't be depended on at all. If you want to wake up to music, it will
often load the "are you still listening" button instead of actually loading
music. ...sorry, I'm asleep waiting for you to wake me up with music, and
you're not playing music because you're waiting for me to press this
button. This is not helpful.
--Spotify really should have an alarm clock. This isn't a complicated,
rocket-science feature. Why doesn't it exist?!?!?!
(3) Spotify/Google/Pandora should add the capability to sync things via
your calendar. For example, you could just set your alarm for each day of
the week and it will trigger Spotify/Pandora to start playing music. This
way you could pick different music/playlists for different days/times. It
would also be great to be able to trigger different ambient music for
different times of day (morning/afternoon/evening). I basically always
have music playing when I'm home and view it as synonymous with turning the
lights on when I'm in the room. There should always be music -it should
just be easier to control it than the present nightmare.
(4) Someone needs to make a web-app that's a home automation dashboard.
Right now everything is geared towards mobile. I get it, lots of people
are doing more and more of their activities/controls from their phones.
But when you need to do a lot of stuff, or complicated stuff -it makes
sense that you'd sit down at your computer to do it. You shouldn't need a
desktop app for that, since the valuable parts of the service require
connectivity anyway. You really just need a good web-app... and that's
lacking across the board. 3 huge multi-billion dollar organizations that
are all failing their users here by not doing something that's ultimately
fairly simple. Epic fail.
