Help! I'm an Android user living in a HomePod household

By Anula Wiwatowska

Last updated 22 December 2021

There are a handful of important conversations you should have with your partner before you move in together. Are expiry dates on food real? Sauce in the fridge or the cupboard? Labor or Liberal? In consolidating our lives my partner and I came across one more crucial decision. Are we an Alexa, Google Home, or HomePod family?

By now almost everyone I know has ended up with at least one kind of smart speaker, and as tech journalists the two of us have accumulated far more than our fair share. When making the choice we didn’t have to sit there and weigh up the pros and cons of every device - we’ve already done that. Hell, even if we did want to Google it there is a strong chance that a review with one of our names on it would pop up.

Long story short, we both know what we’re talking about. Neither of us are afraid to debate our choice, and yet somehow I, an adamant Android user now live in a HomePod household, and there is a relationship hanging in the balance.

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Like most of Apple’s ecosystem, using a HomePod is still experienced best through an Apple device. While I can indeed speak to Siri, tell her to turn on our lights, sing me to sleep with rain sounds, and use it as an intercom to get my partner’s attention in the other room, I can’t actually make any real decisions in our home. Well not about the smart home features at least.

In setting up our smart bulbs we used my partner's Apple ID, because I can’t make one independently. This means that the room with our desks is called “the office” rather than “the study.” He set up our bedside table lamps to turn on when you ask for the “bed” to be turned on, but all the lights come on if you say “bedroom”... I think. I can never remember.

If I don’t want to speak to Siri, and would like the luxury of controlling the lights through a remote of sorts I would need to pick up his phone in order to do it. Grabbing my partner’s phone out of nowhere feels very wrong to me. Sure, we’ve discussed setting up an iPad on the wall which can work as a hub of sorts, but needing to go to a central location in order to remotely turn on the lights defeats the purpose. If I wanted to stand up then I could just go to the actual light switch.

All of these are small foibles that really don’t matter in the long run. I can get used to them, we can work around them, but running an Android device as my daily driver means that I HAVE to get used to them. I can’t set up my own voice profile and alter commands to ones that make sense for me, or connect my calendar, or use it to locate my tech. I can’t play with settings on my phone. I just have to learn to do it in the way it has been set up, or I need to set up an iPad or an extra iPhone just so that I can make changes without consulting my partner. In a household that I want to control, I have in fact lost it.

By this point, I’m assuming anyone who has ever been forced to relinquish control in a relationship is silently screaming at me through the screen.

He’s, she’s, and they’s… Please, return to your assigned seats. My relationship with my partner is not the one that is troubled, but my relationship with Android is on the rocks.

The thing is that if I really had a problem with picking Siri over Google Assistant or Alexa I could say it, and we would move on. But having our home powered by HomePod just works. It works annoyingly well. It works so well that I am beginning to consider crossing that bridge over to the orchid.

As much as I hate to admit it, Apple has made some drastic improvements to HomePods and their smart home connectivity. When I initially compared the three virtual assistants (or Robot Butlers as my mum calls them) back in 2020, Google Assistant and by proxy Google Nests were the right choice.

The manufacturer’s smart speakers were cheaper, had a wider range of products, could perform more skills than the others, and were compatible with more smart home products. Not only was this absolute vindication as an Android stan, but it helped to validate the choice to stick with Android devices in the face of Apple’s domination. If I couldn’t educate my home through Apple devices then what was the point in admitting defeat?

Fast forward to just the next year, and Apple’s HomePod offering is nothing like it was when I last made my assessment. Now the HomePod mini costs as little as $149 when you used to have to pay $499 for the original HomePod. More manufacturer devices are compatible with HomePod so you don’t need to go searching, and pay through the teeth in order to find a lightbulb that works. The barriers to entry for Apple smart home products have been lowered significantly which is a step in the right direction for Apple’s foothold in the smart home market. But as with anything Apple-made, Android users will never be able to utilise it fully.

Ever since discovering the tech, I have dreamt of living in a smart home. I want to control my lights, music, TV, robot vacuum cleaner, and coffee machine with simple utterances. Even before I started writing about tech I was taking steps towards that reality, but my experience with smart speakers immediately hampered those dreams.

My first Google Home took several seconds to turn on a lightbulb, if it even heard me at all. I progressed on to an Amazon Echo which was a big improvement for a little while, until my light bulbs disconnected and I was literally in the dark as to why. These are small problems for lights, but become enormous issues if the same assistants are controlling the lock on your front door. I don’t trust you with access to my house, Bezos.

After using a veritable mountain of phones, and testing different smart home devices from assorted manufacturers alongside these phones and smart speakers, Apple and the HomePod have proven to be the most reliable. When I ask Siri to do something she does it. Quickly. Efficiently. And every damn time. But I do find myself wishing that I, personally could do more.

For now our smart home is nothing more than a range of light bulbs, and up until living in a HomePod household I had resigned myself to the fact that that is all it would ever be. Reliability aside, Google and Amazon aren’t exactly havens for security. Most Android devices only get around three years of security updates, and I won’t even get started on Amazon. Neither have shown the commitment to data security in the same way that Apple has, and while I may play it relatively fast and loose with my online data, my home is a different story.

Couple together a dependable system that works with a proven track record of protecting, and advocating for users privacy, and those dreams of a Jetsons-style home don’t seem so far fetched anymore. The problem though is that if I want to extend our home’s functionality to a futuristic standard, I need access to an Apple device in order to do it.

In order to do it, I need to end the most steadfast relationship of my life.

“If you love something set it free. If it comes back it's yours. If not, it was never meant to be.’

Maybe it is time to give Android some space. Space to grow on its own - to accomplish what it needs to do to become the best version of itself it can be. Maybe one day it will return and bring with it everything I had always dreamed that it would be. Maybe then we can build a home together.

Maybe I'm being naive.

But love does make fools of us all.