Google has acknowledged that the Google Home app for managing Smart Home Devices doesn’t offer the best experience, and now they are aiming to change it. On Wednesday, along with new nested devices and upcoming Google Home smart speakers, Tech Giant announced a redesigned version of the Google Home app.
While AI could be a headline feature about new features in the Google Home app, the app itself has overhauled design, performance and reliability, Google claims.
Anish Kattukaran, chief product officer at Google Home and Nest, told reporters ahead of today’s news.
So, he said, they had to resolve other issues with the app before the company worked on adding new AI features.
“The number one was performance,” he said. “Performance is definitely a journey. We’re not at our destination… we have to continue to evolve.”
Over the past few months, Google says it has brought some major improvements, with 70% startups 70% faster, 80% less crashes, and other battery and memory improvements. Over the past year, we have shipped over 100 performance updates and app features to our apps. This means it works on more than 800 million devices from over 50,000 OEMs. (Google announced support for 750 million devices at its developer conference in May 2025.)
The nest comes to the “home”
Additionally, the company has made it the only app needed to manage the Google Home app NEST users’ devices. Over the years that followed, Google has slowly and repeatedly brought NEST app functionality to Google Home, and now I feel that the journey is complete. (The Nest app has not yet disappeared, but the owner of the Nest Device must be ready for its final future.)
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As for devices, the app now supports Nest Thermostats from 2015 onwards, including schedules, energy history, and hot water boost features. It also supports nest cameras and doorbells (including history transitions), Nest Protect emergency notifications for smoke and CO alerts, and Nest passcode management for Nest x Yale locks.
The Nest-focused Google Home app improves camera features, including a better scrubbing experience for moving videos, a faster and smoother camera feed, and a richer animation preview for iOS and Android notifications. According to Google, Camera Live View loads 30% faster than before, with 40% reduction in playback failures.
Camera tiles are also loaded instantly, and scrolling through camera history is smoother as the frame rate is over 6 times higher, Google claims.
The updated Google Home app only has three tabs for simplicity. Home, activities, automation.
Additionally, gesture support has been added. This means you can swipe in the Home tab to navigate between all your devices and your favorite devices, as well as across different dashboards. You can also swipe around the camera view. Swipe through the entire camera view to toggle between Timeline and Event views to the exit, or left or right.
In the video player, you can double-tap left or right to rewind or fast-forward as you can on YouTube.
Event notifications will be deployed on iOS or Android, with a rich, animated preview, and you can easily see what’s going on at home from your smartphone’s lock screen. AI can also summarise activities directly in alerts and camera history, so instead of seeing “motion detected”, you can see what activity actually happened.
The Activities tab of the Google Home app provides a history of activity across your home, including devices not created by Google or Nest. At the top of the tab there is a “home brief” feature with new AI. This will summarise what happened at the home that day using Gemini and save you from reading several hours of alerts and events.
You can use the included filter or use “Ask Home” to find a specific event. The latter is a new way to interact with Gemini via the app.
This search and help feature is permanently accessible through Google Home’s new header navigation, suggesting relevant devices and automation when you start typing things like “lights” or “living room”, for example.
With Gemini ai, you can use natural language to ask questions about your home, ask for specific camera clips, control multiple devices at once, and create automation simply by explaining them. This allows Gemini to answer questions such as “When did the kids come home?” Or “Did you leave the car door open?”
When viewing camera events, AI can also explain the activity the camera is looking at, explaining what caused the house movement and where it is. This AI description will be displayed below the video clip.
Some AI features – you need a Google Home Premium subscription, such as writing and automating automation using Gemini, home briefs, asking home, etc. This starts at $10 a month, but access is included with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions at no additional charge.
The Automation tab in the Google Home app shows users not only a list of automations, but also what happens in the next few hours at home via a new carousel at the top of the screen.
Google notes that tabs, previously embedded in web views, are natively built into iOS and Android to improve performance. The Automation Editor has also been redesigned, allowing new options for one-time conditional automation.
Gemini also allows users to gain insight into their homes, like details about their energy usage. You can ask how long AC last week was running, especially when the TV was in use over the weekend.
The Google Home 4.0 app updates began rolling out to global users on October 1st and will continue for the next few days until reaching all users.
To get the update first, Google clicks its profile icon to open the Google Home app, then tap “Home Settings.” Scroll down and select Early Access to participate in the test.
