When I got my Pixel 2 it came with a Google home mini. I decided I would give it a shot so other people can control the Hue lights in my flat.
However I was deeply disappointed to find I could only make it work if I open up two holes in my firewall, allowing Google Home mini to talk to Google then Google talking to Philips who then talk through my other hole in my firewall to my Hue lights!
Even saying the above is a clear sign of how stupid the whole thing is…
So annoyed I sold it straight away. But it looks like I wasn’t the only one who fed back to Google how stupid this all was and early last year they included some code in their SDK to include local access.
Now it looks like its ready and I noticed Philips Hue and TPlink are one of the first lot of services to support this.
If this works as it says I may buy a Google home mini or I noticed the Google home hub is going for half price right now. Of course I’ll make sure the firewall stay closed and will be watching how people find the local access. What a field day people will have if Google screw this one up…!
I’ve got four Google Minis, one Nest Mini and five Hue lights and I’m sure I didn’t need to adjust the port forwarding on the firewall to do this.
You must have Upnp enabled? I turned that off ages ago, don’t like random devices enabling ports.