Google updates its Home app with Gemini smarts | TechCrunch

Google admits that its Google Home app for managing smart home devices has not offered the best experience, and it now aims to change that. On Wednesday, alongside new Nest devices and an upcoming Google Home smart speaker, the tech giant also unveiled a redesigned version of the Google Home app that it promises will work better, centralize device management, and bring its AI assistant Gemini AI into the experience.

While AI may be the headline feature about what’s new with the Google Home app, the app itself has had an overhaul, in design, performance, and reliability, Google claims.

“I want to be very direct, the Google Home app has not been the experience that we’ve always wanted it to be,” Anish Kattukaran, chief product officer at Google Home and Nest, told reporters in a briefing ahead of today’s news.

So before the company could work on adding new AI features, it had to solve the app’s other problems, he said.

“Number one was performance,” he said. “Performance is definitely a journey. We are not at the destination… It’s got to continue to evolve.”

Over the past several months, Google says it’s made some major improvements, leading to 70% faster startup, 80% fewer crashes, and other battery and memory improvements. Over the past year, it’s also shipped over 100 performance updates and app features to the app, which today works across over 800 million devices from more than 50,000-plus OEMs, meaning companies that make devices compatible with Google Home. (Google had announced support for 750 million devices at its developer conference back in May 2025.)

Nest comes ‘Home’

In addition, the company is working to make the Google Home app the only app Nest users need to manage their devices, more than a decade after the company’s 2014 acquisition of the device maker. Over the years that followed, Google has slowly and iteratively been bringing Nest app features to Google Home and now feels that journey is complete. (The Nest app isn’t going away just yet, but Nest device owners should be ready for that eventual future.)

In terms of devices, the app now supports Nest thermostats from 2015 onward, including their schedules, energy history, and hot water boost features. It also supports Nest cameras and doorbells (including migrating their history), Nest Protect’s emergency notifications for smoke and CO alerts, and Nest’s passcode management for the Nest x Yale Locks.

With the focus on Nest, the Google Home app is improving camera features, including a better scrubbing experience for moving through video, a faster and smoother camera feed, and richer animated previews on iOS and Android notifications. Google says camera live views load 30% faster than before and it decreased playback failures by 40%.

Camera tiles also load instantly, and scrolling through the camera’s history is smoother with a more than 6x higher frame rate, Google claims.

The updated Google Home app now has just three tabs for simplicity’s sake: Home, Activity, and Automation.

Plus, it added support for gestures, meaning you could swipe on the Home tab to move between all devices and favorite devices, or to move through various dashboards. You can also swipe to move around within the camera view, like swiping down to see the full camera view, up to exit, or left and right to toggle between the timeline view and the events view.

On the video player, you can double-tap on the left or right to rewind or fast-forward, as you can on YouTube.

Event notifications on iOS or Android now expand, showing rich, animated previews, making it easier to see what’s happening at home from your smartphone’s lock screen. AI can also summarize the activity directly in the alerts and in your camera history, so instead of seeing “motion detected,” you’ll see what activity actually took place.

The Google Home app’s Activity tab showcases the activity history for your entire home, including devices that are not made by Google or Nest. At the top of the tab is a new AI-powered “Home Brief” feature, which uses Gemini to summarize things that happened in the home that day, saving you from reading through hours of alerts and events.

To find specific events, you can use the included filters or just “Ask Home” — the latter being a new way to interact with Gemini through the app.

This search and help feature is persistently accessible from the new header navigation in Google Home and will suggest related devices and automations as you begin to type things in, like “lights” or “living room,” for instance.

You can use Gemini AI to ask questions about your home using natural language, ask for a specific camera clip, control multiple devices at once, and create automations just by describing them, among other things. This lets Gemini answer questions like “When did the kids come home?” or “Did I leave the car door open?”

When you’re viewing camera events, the AI can also describe the activity the camera sees, explaining what caused motion in the home and where it was located. This AI description appears below the video clip.

Some AI features — like using Gemini to make home automations by describing them, the Home Brief, and Ask Home — require a Google Home Premium subscription, however. This starts at $10 per month, but access is included with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions at no extra charge.

On the Google Home app’s Automation tab, users will see not only their list of automations but also what’s going to happen over the next couple of hours in the home via a new carousel at the top of the screen.

The tab, previously an embedded web view, is also now natively built into iOS and Android, Google notes, for better performance. The Automations editor has been redesigned, too, allowing for new options for one-time and conditional automations.

Gemini also allows users to gain insights about their home, like details about their energy use. You can ask about things like how long the AC ran for last week, or how long the TV was used over the weekend, among other things.

The Google Home 4.0 app update will start rolling out to global users on October 1 and will continue over the coming days until it reaches all users.

To get the update first, Google says to open the Google Home app, click your profile icon, then tap on “Home Settings.” Scroll down and select “Early Access” to join the test.