Google: Read my lips. You cannot link up a G Suite account with Nest smart home gizmos Nest users are shouting at Google to let them register G Suite accounts to their home assistant and automation devices. We're waiting to hear back from Google, but so far its tech support is sticking to the line that there is no way to register a G Suite account and only a freebie Gmail addy will do. A support droid wrote on …
Been stuck with this issue myself for a long time. I'm grandfathered in on the free service from back when it was still called Google Apps. All my family have an email address on my domain running through it.
Because of whatever policy they have in place, I can't sign up for Google One, I can't get a shared family YouTube Premium account, I can't invite family members to my Google home.
"Switch to a normal Gmail account!" they say. Brilliant, so I then lose access to all the apps I've purchased and there is no way to migrate years and years of email, calendar entries and all the other data Google holds on me. I don't want to have two separate Google accounts, it sort of defeats the point doesn't it?
They need to do something to sort this out. Either allow Gsuite users into the fold or give us an easy way to migrate everything over to a normal Gmail account without losing everything!
I couldn't agree more. I was on a free google apps account and was finding I was missing out on more and more functionality. So, about 2 years ago I took the drastic step of moving to a gmail account. It was a long hard process.
I managed to move all my emails over, but of course they all ended up in the inbox and not the nicely organised folders I had
I shared my photos with my new account, but I seem to have lost all the location info. I need to get round to exporting them all from the old account, recombining them with the exif data and then importing them into the new account
And of course I lost access to all my paid for apps and media
I am glad I made the change, but it has left a bad taste behind...
no way to migrate years and years of email, calendar entries
You should have thought of that before not paying for it... As well as how you were planning to back up all that data if it is of such value to you.
I'm not a G Suite user, but I think it supports IMAP, in which case you could use something like imapsync to copy your e-mail to another IMAP-enabled account. I'm pretty sure you can export calendar entries, too. And don't worry about "all the other data Google holds", their one job is to make sure that follows you forever, however hard you try to avoid it.
Back when I got on board, it was nothing but email and calendaring. There was no Android, no app store, no google drive, none of the other stuff that was later tacked on. Had I envisaged a future mobile operating system with apps I could buy and ad free video service that I wouldn't be able to use to their fullest I'd probably have chosen differently.
Never had any restrictions on what Google services I could use, it's only recently that they've started offering other services like YouTube premium, Google Home/Assistant etc that the problem of not being able to use the account fully has popped up.
I pay for Google Drive, I pay for YouTube Premium. I am a paying customer that is unable to use some of their products together for some arbitrary reason.
Having two separate Google accounts isn't actually that painful, FWIW. Between home and work I have a total of four. Pretty much everything supports multiple sign-on now. Mostly you just want to pick one and stick with it for purchases and Android backups, because having them scattered around can get aggravating.
Might the difference be that Google doesn't dig into G-Suite data, but that it freely does so with regular Gmail and Google accounts?
'Smart' devices inherently gather private data and companies, including Google, monetize this. This fits right into messaging services like e-mail they give away for 'free'.
They can't do this with G-Suite because the (business) contract precludes it. If they were doing this (or going to) many companies would stop using their services - either because of concerns over data ex-filtration or because of regulatory constraints.
My experience with G-Suite is that when a new product comes along, it's initially unavailable to G-Suite accounts. Eventually they add an option to allow organizations to turn it on. The whole point of G-Suite is to let the org have control, so you generally have to wait for them to opt in.
Not *everyone* with a G-Suite account pays, incidentally. There used to be a free tier, and those of us who have accounts on it are grandfathered in. Not everything available to business customers is available on the free tier though.
Just like Drat, I am in the same position, along with so many others. You only have to see the number of Forums related to the problem with using Google Home products with Gsuite accounts to realize how many people are affected and for how long this has been a problem.
Google fail to make this clear around any of their products and it is extremely frustrating to have purchased them and find usage is limited.
Many of us were encouraged on to the Google apps platform in it's BETA days (now Gsuite) and have a lot of investment in it. yet we are now stuck because we cannot use any of the products that would be useful (Family/One etc ) not to mention the limits around usage of Google home devices.
Most of us are willing and would welcome te opportunity to pay for additional services but we just can't!
Google continue to avoid answering any questions around their plans for this, other than to ask us to provide feedback t their engineering teams.
If only they had a Gsuite type service that was available for families and worked with all their products.
what makes it even worse is how difficult it is to migrate from Gsuite to a gmail account!
At the moment I am in the process of moving to O365 - weirdly I will then have a better experience and integration with Google products than before!!!
Admittedly it won't be perfect.
Well, if at all possible, I would suggest that everyone just don't use any of this IOT crap from anyone. It seems apparent to me from their behavior that Google, MS, FB, Comcast, AT&T and all these other big corporations have the ethics of a rabid piranha in a toilet bowl. I realize that some people must use their wares and are unwilling victims. And yes, I have an Android phone because I can't afford to pay the "Cupertino idiot tax" as El Reg refers to it.
But insofar as I can, I disable tracking and slurping in what I do use and try to avoid giving any money or useful information to those monsters. They already have far too much money and power, and will stop at nothing to gain more. Aside from just being the cheap bastard I am, I don't want to help make the monsters even more powerful than they already are.
"We hear your frustration and understand change isn't easy," support cooed. "Our first step as Google Nest was to go beyond the idea of a 'smart home,' and to focus instead on creating a 'helpful home'. With that comes some growing pains, but our goal is simple: earn and keep your trust by clearly explaining how our products work and how we'll uphold our commitment to respect your privacy."
What a smarmy load of shit.
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