Google updates its Home app with new camera features – but is it too little, too late?

It’s safe to say that Google Home hasn’t had the best few months. Nest users have been complaining about glitches to their smart home devices, mainly focused around Google Assistant misunderstanding or completely ignoring commands.

These issues continued with users reporting that their smart lights were no longer working properly. Following these reports, Google apologised but nothing really seemed to be done, prompting rumours about a lawsuit.

Now, we’ve gotten more of an answer and some action, thanks to this recent Google Home app update. As posted on the Google Nest Community, the Google Home app has been given new features and performance improvements to enhance your Nest camera experience.

Now available in the Google Home app, preview snapshots can now be viewed in camera tiles, so you can quickly see and identify your security camera without having to wait for the live view. Event notifications previews now come with a static thumbnail and a large animated preview which you can press and hold to see on an iOS device or click the expand arrow on an Android device.

Speaking of live view, Google has also improved its reliability and accuracy regarding your camera being online or offline. If your camera is offline, you’ll be notified in the Google Home app and your live stream recovers properly rather than showing an irritating error message.

The Google Home app has further been updated with better video history and timeline reviews, so you can quickly scroll through recordings with seek buttons and by tapping left or right on the video. Scrolling in general has been made more responsive and smooth on Android, plus the Google Home app now has swipe gestures to navigate different features.

The Google Home app has also enhanced camera performance with better signals, reduced latency, and less ‘no video available’ errors. It’s also focused on improving the performance of original Nest Cam, Cam Outdoor and Nest Doorbell devices, including speedier uploads, and less video and audio upload failures.

Following these updates – and the aforementioned bugs and glitches – Google also included somewhat of an apology in its Nest Community post. At the bottom of the updates, Google said “while we may not always hit the mark, we remain committed to listening to our users and building initiative, reliable and high-performing camera features for your home."

Google went on to say that they were grateful for the engagement and feedback, and there would be more camera improvements coming soon. While there was no real apology surrounding the other issues that have been reported, it’s good to see that something is being done, but it could be too little, too late for some users.