Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised by how bad this device is, but in this day and age one expects so much more of consumer devices. Still, Amazon always manages to plumb the depths of software quality for its end users. I say this as both an inveterate Amazon customer (the shopping web site is ugly and brain-dead in many ways, but I live with it), and as a developer who uses Amazon Web Services (their user interfaces are absolutely terrible, but the underlying services are a life saver, and I do all my computing on AWS). I'm a little weirded out by the criticisms of others complaining about things like the USB connector. My complaints with this offering have nothing to do with the hardware. You plug it in and (putting aside minor gripes about the labeling of the button) it works, and unless you move it a lot and break the cable you should never care about the connector. I'm prepared to stipulate that the hardware works pretty much according to specification. What I'm offended by is the software, which renders the whole thing effectively useless. It's way worse than even the quick and dirty one-off apps I write for my own use. That Amazon would release this would be shocking for any other vendor, but Amazon's end-user experience is universally terrible, so I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised. Without going into a multi-page review (and diatribe) about the Air Quality Monitor, I'll make just a few observations, but suffice it to say that this is a frustrating piece of junk. A device that works but is effectively unusable doesn't really work in any reasonable sense. It's as if you buy a car but the driver's seat is facing backwards. Yes, you can drive it, but it's so painful, slow and inconvenient to do so that you would quickly give up on it. First off, Why on earth does this have to live inside the Alexa app? Why do I have to install some gigantic piece of bloatware just to access an air quality monitor? I understand that there may be some internal technical reason why they want to bind all Alexa API-using devices into a common platform, or perhaps Amazon thinks that they can suck/sucker me into buying into the grander Alexa vision now that I've installed the Alexa app, but all this actually does is convince me that I'll never, ever get any sort of Alexa device. The data recorded by the monitor, what I think of as "My" data (but doubtless I signed ownership of it away in the EULA) all all sitting up somewhere in Amazon land, but I can't access it from a browser. Why not? It's not as if I want to access my air quality monitor from a bus stop and so it absolutely must be a mobile app. This is a passive device. I can't use it to turn on my heating. I'm much more likely to want to use it for post-hoc data processing. OK, here are a few comments and problems with reasonable-seeming use cases: * I'd like to be able to track my indoor temperature so as to understand my heating bills and look for anomalies (the same applies to any other metric supported, of course). I fire up the Alexa app (Grrrrr: see above), and select the AQM device (why do I have to keep doing this if I only have one Alexa-compliant device). There's no tabulation of the data, so I have to look at the graph at the bottom of the screen. This has three levels of granularity: Hour, Day, and Week (no Month or Year). I want to look back over a few weeks, so I have to page back through the weeks one-by-one. There's no date range selector as you'd expect for any normal app. Each time I hit the "Previous" button it takes about five seconds to display each successive week. It does this as a bar chart. OK, so I spend (waste) a couple of minutes stepping back in time and see a bright red bar a few months back (let's say three months = 12 weeks/clicks for the sake of argument). Hmmm, that looks like a problem, so I click on the bar to drill into it. Right? Wrong - doesn't work. O, I'm frustrated by this annoying oversight, but I click on the "Day" button to change the granularity of the display, but OH NO, the display teleports me back to the current day. I now have to click the "Previous" button to get to the day in question (again), but now I have to go through seven times as many clicks, each at the cost of another five seconds. I dread to think what might happen if I then wanted to see the hour-granularity data. Yes, I'd have to click 24 * 7 * 12 = times to get back to the hour I care about. Yes, that's a total of 2.8 HOURS of mindless clicking. * Just to add insult to injury from the above, I rest the edge of my hand on the screen (I'm left-handed and my Android tablet is sitting beside me on the desk as I type this - it happens a lot) and it interprets that as my clicking on the "Home button". This doesn't take me to the Home of the AQM app, it blows me right out to the root of the Alexa app. Well, there go my all my hours of clicking. Sigh. * In frustration from all of the above clicking around, I decide that I might just as well give up on the crappy UI, download a spreadsheet of the data and process it myself. Oops, there's no download button. What???? * OK, so there's no spreadsheet export/download button, so I'll google around and look for an API to access the data. Nooooooo! There appears to be no such API. * Sigh, now I'm really sick of this. I'll try and hack it by sniffing the network traffic and see if I can reverse-engineer things and do it the hard way, so I configure my Android device to use a debugging proxy (Charles, in my case), but I then find that Android (and thereby the Alexa app) won't accept the SSL certificate from the proxy, so it refuses to let me do it. * So, now I have no way to access MY data other than to use the Alexa app's UI. I'll try to do the best I can. I look at the temperature graph, which like all of the graphs is an anemic graph with super-thin columns (why?). There's a horizontal line showing the average temperature, but no labels on the Y axis, so you don't get any real sense of what's going on. You look a little closer and think "What's the zero on the Y axis? What do the bars actually mean?" It turns out that you can click on the bars to see the actual data value for any given bar, but the difference in heights is tiny. A quick screen shot and measuring the graph in Photoshop shows that (at least in my case) the "Average" line is 200 pixels up from the bottom of the bars. A little arithmetic reveals that the Y-axis zero is actually set to zero degrees Fahrenheit. Think about that for a minute. This is an INDOOR air quality monitor, but you'd have to have 32 degrees of frost indoors to get a zero-height bar. Differences of a degree or two (say, 68F vs. 70F) make a huge difference to one's level of comfort, but a difference of one degree amounts to only 3.5 pixels. This graph is effectively useless. * The average (mean) of a statistic isn't necessarily a useful statistical measure of what's going on. With air quality you care about the ability of your heating system to regulate your home's temperature consistently and accurately. For measures of pollutants you care about consistently high values (if varying) and major anomalies, so the fact that you can't get the raw data out, or display max/min/SD data on the graphs, make it all even less useful. * The "Week" granularity graph is not defined as the last seven days of data, it's defined as the data since the most recent Monday. Thus, you only get all the data you might want to see on Sunday. Why don't you get to see the last seven days? Why can't you just specify an arbitrary date window as you can on pretty much any other app? OK, enough whining on my part. The hardware for this device is (as far as I can tell) completely reasonable, but the software makes the hardware inaccessible. I was so offended by this that I decided to spend an amount of my time that would have bought this product many times over to try to warn others away from getting it. If you only want to see today's numbers then it's merely slow and annoying, and maybe worth 2.5 stars. If you want to do anything else then it's simply worthless, and the star rating model doesn't go low enough. P.S. As I navigated to the Amazon web site to enter this review I was faced with an ad for this very monitor in the banner ad carousel. Way to go, Amazon, advertising things to me that I've already been dumb enough to buy. It has a little logo graphic saying "Works with Alexa". It should say "Doesn't work without Alexa," or better yet, "Doesn't really work even with Alexa."