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- Hacker News
- Since beginning of 2025 big corps turned to be each time more anti consumer. They feel quite comfortable. I wonder what happened for them to feel like that.by motbus3
- just since 2025?by replygirl
- Any actual evidence to backup this claim?by nxm
- Reminds me of a recent tweet:
> this has been talked about extensively you're just 21
This isn't new behavior. Not by years, but decades.
by tyre - Pretty sure that phone companies have been anti-customer ever since the invention of the telephone.by mr_toad
- > Since beginning of 2025
I suggest you to study the birth of consumer protection laws on the beginning of the 20th century, such as the birth of the FTC in 1914. It was a time when milk and beer were routinely adulterated, most meat was contaminated and all sorts of cartels did price fixing [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_Act_o...
by diego_moita - Sounds to me like you just became aware of it in 2025. This has been happening for forever. Keeping with the electronics example, the Phoebus cartel was lowering the lifespan of lightbulbs in the 1920s. The US government seemed to be stricter on it at that time (I mean in the 1920s), but billions of dollars in lobbying will change that over time.by bigC5560
- "Without the app we won't be able to text back and forth, see where they are, or add new contacts (the watch blocks calls except to/from contacts)."
"Our older two kids, Lily and Anna, are ten and eight, and are mature enough that they're able to cross streets and handle unusual situations. They can go to the park or a nearby friends house on their own, but we do need to know where they are"
"Meet Gizmo Watch 3, the smartwatch that introduces kids to wireless technology safely. With an SOS button, voice and video calling4 and text messaging,"
After clicking around the article and the watch page and desperately trying to figure out why a 20 bucks casio F91 isn't doing the job, all I have to say is, thank god I am a millenial instead of being raised by one
by Barrin92 - Seems like you are getting caught up on the watch form-factor. If you think of it as a stripped down cell phone for a kid you don't want to have a cell phone yet, this product makes perfect sense.by corpoposter
- > “Family does not yet support cases where you have Gizmos as your only Verizon lines of service…”
Curious if the c-suite knew of this corner before they approved the change. Cherry on top that customers might have to buy more services to continue their lifestyles.
by xtiansimon - If anyone is still following this, it is July 10 and my GizmoHub app is still connected to my kid’s watch, and the map and messages still work fine.by snowwrestler
- Google Fi has become shit anyway. Much too expensive and if you use it too much abroad, they cut you off.
Any recommendations for alternatives?
by Beijinger - I wonder what the warranty period on this sort of device is. It’s broken without access to the hub, right? And it’s only 2 years old.by bee_rider
- It’s one year, and only for hardware defects.by dmd
- I feel like this is an edge case where it's less expensive for Verizon to issue a refund than it is to actually fix the problem. Sometimes paying for the problem to go away is the best solution and you get a new thing that works better.by mgiampapa
- Bold of you to believe that Verizon will issue a refund or can do it successfully if they want.by dghlsakjg
- Prediction: absolutely nothing will happen about resolving this. Ever. And eventually they will find a line in the ToS allowing this and point to it — some paragraph that says they may cut any line of service with no notice at all you you still owe them your firstborn and the payment for the rest of your contract, and also you now need to change your name to Verizon.by dmitrygr
- And owe them royalties for infringement on the name "Verizon."by hansvm
- ```The associate agreed with me that they should not deprecate the old app until the new app can handle this configuration. I asked them to raise this up the chain: they need to push back the deprecation date.```
There's no way a CSR has any power over this.
by cwyers - But they can, and do. escalate problems. It’s not like there’s a side entrance for people with problems that a CSR can’t solve.by DrewADesign
- I have a verizon watch only account. I was able to get the new app working, but it was a struggle. I think it worked on the 3rd or 4th attempt. I had to start over and lost all of the contacts that were connected to the watch. Fortunately, there were only a few.
Overall, the Gizmo watch has been nice to have, but it leaves a lot to be desired. It's surprising that there are not better products in this market segment.
by teliskr - by 43920
- The Apple Watch isn’t a better product?by Grombobulous
- Cell phone enabled watches are a pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks on top of a system pretending to be a telephone switch board from the 1940s. It’s surprising any of it works.by bombcar
- That's how most software works, nowadays: https://xkcd.com/2030/by dlcarrier
- I just went through this yesterday. My wife and I both have Apple Watches with LTE and I was rolling them over: both phones and my watch ported easily but the second watch wouldn’t show up on the account at all with no explanation. The first support person couldn’t see a problem with the details they were able to see, the second level one could see a fraud hold for non-specific reasons and forwarded us to a fraud team who verified my identity and back to a third person who solved the problem by deleting and recreating the line on our account. Every one of the people I talked to was clearly trying to help but their billing system sounds like it’s someone’s old house primarily consisting of duct tape and stucco.
This is a disappointing contrast to their actual network which is clearly run by people who take running a reliable network seriously with good coverage and latency.
by acdha - In what way are watches with SIMs (or eSIMs) not just tiny cell phones? Or is you meaning that the modern smartphone is itself a “pile of hacks sitting on top of hacks”?by derefr
- So the author probably could have migrated if he hadn't used a Google Fi phone number for 2FA. Some banks and businesses (such as Uber) will detect a Google Fi or Google Voice number and not let you use them. Other businesses don't do the detection, but the 2FA texts will never arrive. Like the author, I've got some accounts that I was able to set up for 2FA using a Google account, but 2FA no longer works on them.by anonymousiam
- switching to voice calls seems to help.by fragmede
- I've used Google Voice since it was Grand Central and switched to Fi the month it came out, and I have never experienced what you're describing.by bastawhiz