[Poll results out] Cync (C by GE) should fix its smart home integration with Google Home or risk losing users

New updates are being added to the bottom of this story…

Original story (from Sept 05) follows:

Google has the upper hand in today’s smart home compared to Amazon and Apple. Of the three company’s virtual assistants (Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri), Google arguably has the superior offering in terms of features and functionality.

You’ll find the virtual assistant baked into just about every Google hardware. But the best part is having it baked right into Nest devices for an easy-to-use smart home control system.

The fact that it works with a wide range of devices and not just Google’s hardware thanks to the partnerships with many 3rd-party players means you can control lights, heating, TVs, fridges, blinds, and lots of other things in the home with your voice.

Manufacturers of smart home products know that Google’s dominance in the voice assistant market means the best smart home devices need to work with Google Assistant or risk missing out on a huge market.

But to be safer, a significant number of smart home devices come with support for multiple voice assistants. And this is exactly what you get with Cync smart home products.

You can use either Google Assistant or Alexa to control Cync smart home products, formerly known as C by GE.

But over the past few months, plenty of reports related to poor Cync integration with Google Home have been doing rounds in various user forums.

Not having Google Assistant support is a dealbreaker for me when shopping for smart home products. In fact, that’s one of my top-most priority. However, it’s another thing when you actually have it on board but can hardly use it since it’s broken nearly all the time.

This is the conundrum many owners of C by GE smart bulbs and other smart home products from the company have had to deal with for months, arguably ever since the rebrand happened.

A quick look through the Google Home subreddit reveals heaps of threads [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] spewing negative feedback towards Cync smart home products and their poor integration with Google Home.

I started having some problems with my C by GE lightbulbs. They were not responding to voice commands or routines. I reset the bulbs. Added them to the GE app. Updated the firmware. Reset the bulbs. Added them to google home. Now they are still intermittent.

Sometimes they respond, sometimes they don’t. GH accurately reports on/off, but when I try to switch with voice/routine, it fails. Is anyone else having this problem? WITF GE can’t just adopt “works with google” I don’t know. I am about ready to dump them and start over. I have the newer generation bulbs at my other house and they seem to work OK.
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Cync (C by GE) is genuinely the worst user experience I’ve ever had. Last year, I bought some C by GE lightbulbs and a smartplug for my college apartment. Connected them to the Google Home app, and I constantly had connection issues and generally just a poor experience, so I decided when I moved out that it wasn’t even worth taking them with me and threw them out. Oh what a bad idea that was.
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While I’m definitely not privy to the in-house dealings that pushed the rebrand from C by GE to Cync, a fresh start is usually high on the agenda when companies make such moves.

And this is definitely not the type of fresh start they envisioned. On the brighter side, you can always expect a rugged start to life when such changes take place.

Fitbit is also going through a similar transition following the acquisition by Google, with the search giant expected to steady the ship in the coming days after settling in.

Should the Cync family expect the same? Why not! After all, there’s little they can do than wait, although for how long is what should concern Cync.

There’s a bunch of users that’s making it clear they’re ditching their existing C by GE smart home products in favor of other brands, something that should worry Cync amid growing competition from the east.

Heck, we’ve seen a good number say they already moved to other brands like Philips Hue and they haven’t experienced the same issues with Google Home, further mounting pressure on Cync to act sooner than later.

Xiaomi, to be more specific, is becoming a huge threat to smart home brands from the west. The Chinese company already made some serious inroads in Europe and it doesn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

Unless Cync steps up and addresses the annoying integration issues with the Google Home, it stands to lose. And it may have no one else to blame but itself.

We’d like to know what you think in the comments section below. You can also vote on the Twitter poll below, with the results to be shared after a week.

The poll results are live. Although this poll received very less number of votes, but the outcome suggests the poor integration issues with Google Home will drive majority users away from Cync (C by GE) smart bulbs.

In case you missed the poll, you can share your thoughts in the comments section below.

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