topic Re: Upgraded my Nest camera to Nest Cam (battery) - lost the ability to share. WTF? in Cameras and Doorbells

Upgraded my Nest camera to Nest Cam (battery) - lost the ability to share. WTF?

jjay — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 15:29:54 GMT

I have been running a Nest camera for years and sharing it with a third-party who should not have access to anything else in my home.

I have just spent the better part of the (cold) morning uninstalling the Nest camera and installing the Nest Cam (battery). Not only can I no longer see my camera location via the browser, I can no longer share that location without inviting the third party to have full access to my entire home.

Why is Google unable to support long standing features post acquisition? Nest was acquired in 2014. Who made the development decision to not carry these features (web access, non-home member sharing, public links) on the new app-only platform?

As a result of no web access, I've had to install bluestacks on my desktop so I can see all of my cameras.

I would have thought that the Google / Nest developers were capable enough to include these features. Software is a balance of cost, time, and functionality. I guess functionality suffered to reduce cost and to speed things up over these past 8 years.

Re: Upgraded my Nest camera to Nest Cam (battery) - lost the ability to share. WTF?

MplsCustomer — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 17:10:30 GMT

@jjay

When we bought a Google Nest Camera (Battery) in September 2021, we also discovered that the new cameras and doorbells released starting in the fall of 2021 are supported ONLY by the Google Home app, and NOT by the Google Nest app or the home.nest.com website, and access to them cannot be shared via a browser link. Other functionality is also lost because they are not supported by the Google Nest app or the home.nest.com website.

Google's rationale is posted in these two blogs in this forum--along with considerable customer reaction:

https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Blog/Message-from-our-GM-Updates-for-our-Nest-customers/ba-p/17122

https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Blog/New-Cameras-and-Google-Home-app/ba-p/4632

Re: Upgraded my Nest camera to Nest Cam (battery) - lost the ability to share. WTF?

jjay — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 17:20:00 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I guess I'm joining the long line of unhappy customers. They should hire better program managers.

Re: Upgraded my Nest camera to Nest Cam (battery) - lost the ability to share. WTF?

jjay — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 10:20:55 GMT

I posted this in another thread, but just in case you miss it, I am now running BlueStacks on my desktop (it's an Android emulator for gaming) that works well for running the Google Home app. It's the only thing I've found that gets close to what we're looking for. Good luck.

Re: Upgraded my Nest camera to Nest Cam (battery) - lost the ability to share. WTF?

GarrettDS — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 15:54:25 GMT

Hey folks,
It looks like we have come to a solution so I'm going to be locking this thread. If you have any other concerns or questions, please feel free to create a new thread.

Have a great day.
Garrett DS