QUICK SUMMARY
A new update to the Google Home app has revealed codes labelled ‘Nest Hub Max’ and ‘Nest Audio’, hinting that new Nest devices could be in the pipeline.
Whether the rumours are true or not remains to be seen, although Google’s upcoming I/O event could reveal more.
The Google Home app recently got an update, and it revealed some (potentially) exciting news. In the 3.16 version of the Google Home app, a few codes have popped up that are hinting that a new Nest Hub Max and Nest Audio could be on the way.
The Google Nest product line hasn’t been added to in quite some time. The latest version of the Google Nest Hub Max and the Nest Audio came out in 2020, so we’ve been waiting a few years for new generations of these best smart speaker and display devices.
While both the Nest Hub Max and Nest Audio are high quality products, their appeal has somewhat dwindled over recent years, and the release of the Google Pixel Tablet in 2023 somewhat overshadowed the Nest line. But that could all be set to change after the recent Google Home update.
The eagle-eyed team at 9to5Google saw that after the Google Home app update, two codes appeared, one labelled as ‘Nest Hub Max’ and the other as ‘Nest Audio’. The codes sat alongside the previous models that are already in the Google Home app, implying that these codes could be completely new editions of Nest devices.
Following a closer inspection from 9to5Google, it was confirmed that the upcoming ‘Nest Hub Max’ will use the same Google Assistant smart display software as previous Nest Hubs. This means that the new Nest Hub Max (if that’s what the code means) won’t use Android.
Unfortunately, aside from these codes and our imagination, there has been nothing confirmed or denied, so we don’t really know what to expect from this news. But the Google I/O 2024 event is coming up on the 14th May, and while we’re expecting to see the Pixel 8a and the Pixel Fold 2 being announced, we might also be hearing about new Nest products too. We’ll just have to wait and see for now.
