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GoogleNestTeam
Community Manager (Admin)
Community Manager (Admin)

Nest Community Members, 

Since launch, many of our long-time Nest customers have provided valuable feedback on our new Nest Cam (battery) and Nest Doorbell (battery) devices -- particularly on the transition to the Google Home app experience. We hear you, and we’re taking your feedback to heart. In this post, I want to share more about our commitments to you going forward. 

 

The transition to the Google Home app

Our new cameras, including the upcoming Nest Cam (indoor, wired) and Nest Cam with floodlight, were made specifically for the Google Home app. Unlike the Nest app, the Google Home app was built to accommodate both battery and wired products, event-based and 24/7 continuous video history, while giving you a whole home view and history of your camera and doorbell feeds across all Nest cameras. You can check out the recent Nest Community blog if you want to read more on Nest cameras and the Home app. 

We chose to transition to the Home app because this app is designed for the future of the smart home — a single place to set up, manage, automate, and control your home. Today, most home devices are controlled across multiple apps, but we’re working on making the Google Home app the central controller across all your home devices, including Google devices and devices from 1,000s of other brands. We continue to make major improvements to the Home app to support this future. 

That being said, this means that existing Nest households with cameras and doorbells prior to Nest Cam (battery) and Nest Doorbell (battery) may have a two app experience. We know this can be frustrating, and we are committed to bringing the experiences and Nest devices you have come to love in the Nest app into the Home app. This will take time to get right, and we will continue to share more details as we have updates.

We are listening to your feedback and will continue to make improvements to advance the camera experience in the Home app. For example, we’ll soon introduce the ability to flip between events quickly and easily, which is helpful for events that are far apart, or if you only want a glimpse of the events versus playing them back fully. And we’ve also been working on rolling out a desktop experience for the Google Home app, so the new Nest cameras and doorbell feeds can be viewed and controlled from there. This will launch in 2022. 

 

Other updates

We also heard feedback from many on the multi-pack cameras only offering a single charging cable. We recognize that this doesn't work for all users, so we are offering a free additional cable(s) to customers who purchased the two-pack or three-pack. Just contact our support team.

Finally, we commit to being more transparent with you on where we are taking the camera portfolio. We know that those with wired doorbell connections prefer to have a doorbell that can also support 24/7 continuous video history (via the Nest Aware subscription). We are excited to share that we will be launching a 2nd generation of Nest Doorbell (wired) in 2022. 

 

Hopefully this post gives you more context on where we’re heading together, and we’ll share our upcoming plans here on the Nest Community. I encourage you to share your feedback with us as we continually improve our products and experiences.

-rishi

 

Rishi Chandra

GM/VP of Google Nest

411 Comments
NestCamLover
Community Member

I'm buying a new home, and I can tell you right now I will not be using Google anything after this fiasco and the complete lack of updates.  I don't trust Google anymore.  I'll be looking for a company with an attention span longer than a year.

Stuy
Community Member

@NestCamLover 

Let us know how you get on, if Google don't get there **** together soon I'll abandon ship and join you.

Sean214
Community Member

@Rishi it's disturbing how little you care for your customers. 

jesselewisUK
Community Member

so I should end my nest aware subscription as you are no longer producing products that will work in a browser?

honore14
Community Member

Does anyone have a recommended alternative to the Nest/google home portfolio? I purchased some additional "nest cameras" and other products to outfit new home and add to my existing camera and thermostat inventory. I was perplexed to find out I can't use Nest app for Nest products anymore. Google Home interface is terrible, while Nest App was so elegant and purposefully designed, and made it easy to use multitude of products with seeing everything immediately upon opening Nest App.

 

I also purchased them on black friday sale for move that was a couple months away, so outside of the return policy. Just looking for alternative that can rival the original Nest experience so I can wash my hands of this google home mess as Googles responses don't give me any confidence this is getting better. It's also been six months since they addressed it and as of yesterday, google home was very poor user experience.

 

Thank you in advance for the recommendations. 

EmptyNester
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

Hello Honore14,   I feel your pain on this.   The new Google cameras might be good but you can't tell because of the Google Home app being so limited and no web interface (been waiting 6 months and still nothing).  I CAN tell you that new Nest Door bell is not very good (in my opinion).  If you read this forum you will see they have functional issues beyond the other new nest cams.  

I have done a good deal of investigating the different camera system out there and here is my recommendations.

#1 Stick with your investment and purchase used Gen 1 cameras from Ebay (or where ever).  I have purchased two this way and both worked perfectly.   For me 24/7 recording is important and Nest is really the only solution that is affordable on the monthly subscription.

#2 I have purchased some of the EUFY cams and I really like them.  They offer amazing bang for the buck. They offer clip recording and clip backup to the cloud (in case the camera is stolen you can still see the footage).  For me the negative is this:  They can record 24/7 to the internal on-board memory chip but you can only see it on your smart phone.  They web interface is good but you can't view the 24/7 footage on the web.   Plus the Frames per second seems a bit slow. However they are 2K cameras and the image looks great.  Also he smartphone software still feels like a toy and lack bells and whistles.

#3 You will be tempted to try ARLO as they are very popular. I tried them and returned them as they just didn't work well for me.  They had FALSE alerts (IE Said there was a person there but it just some some motion).  The battery is a nuisance.  The software is just so-so.  You can't be viewing on a computer and a phone at the same time as they only allow one log-in at a time.  ARLO does offer 24/7 recording but it is $10/month/camera on top of the regular monthly subscription fee.  

#4 Avoid Logitech Circle 2 cams. I have some and they have issued plus they are discontinued with no replacement in site.

In closing be sure to check out many of the product reviews on Youtube. TP-Link cams are worth a look and they are similar to the Eufy.   Researching alternatives is time consuming as the devil seems to always be in the details.

I hope this helps you move forward and I would love to hear what other people are thinking here.

 

 

Mydia_soninke
Community Member

Comment rejoigne compte

poolpuppie
Community Member

Has google responded to any of the comments that people have been posting?  I'm trying to see if I can access the google home app to view my video from my computer instead of on my cell phone (so I have a bigger screen). Anyone know if this is possible? Thanks!

honore14
Community Member

Thank you Empty Nester, very helpful guidance! 

NestCamLover
Community Member

@poolpuppie 

I have not found a way except for possibly installing an android emulator to then install the app that way.  Or maybe via a Chromebook.  But @GoogleNestTeam has had no updates about being able to view it in a browser or via a desktop application, except it was coming sometime in 2022.  And here we are 1/3 of the way through 2022 with not even a timeline.

EmptyNester
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

Hi NestCamLover,  

I honestly believe there is no one at google working on the Google Home App to improve features and functions of the cameras.  How else can it be explained that these cameras came out September of 2021 and here we are 8 months later and I can't see any single thing they have done to the Google Home App with regard to the cameras since the release.

If anyone at Google is actually coding your little fingers away at bring new cameras features to the Google Home app please at the very least chime in and let the very frustrated people on this forum know you exists.

 

eisenb11
Community Member

Seriously. I thought they were going to update Home to fully the support the other cameras, but I still get notifications for some cams on the Nest app and others on Home. Then when I try to view event history on Home, it opens Nest. I have 3 Nest Hubs, but no notifications from anything (by design?) show up on those. Kind of a mess. Also, the Zones feature doesn't work right and I get alerts from Zones set for no alerts - tech support has been useless and it's been almost a year now and the bug is still there. The "blog" is a joke, no updates on there about anything of substance. It seems like no one is working on this stuff. Sad because Nest *had* the potential to be the best ecosystem out there.

ShawnT
Community Member

poolpuppie

I had to install "BlueStacks" app on my desktop an android emulator.  It works OK but you need to understand that you won't have all the features that you have on the nest website and if you have older cameras they won't all work the same on the app. For example you can't scroll back minute by minute on your old cameras like you can on nest. You also can't save video from your old cameras on the home app. I'm having a hard time figuring out how to zoom but I think that's more of an issue with the emulator. Also know that the new cameras won't constantly record like your old cameras so things like creating a time lapse are near impossible. I believe that to be mostly a function of the fact that they are battery powered and wouldn't last long if you could....

ShawnT
Community Member

Hey everyone I have a question about the WIRED flood light camera versus the other battery cameras.

Since the flood light camera is hardwired does it have the ability to 24/7 record? I'm wanting to replace one of my older main cameras with it but it's in a location that I like to be able to go back and scroll minute by minute occasionally. 

boatdude
Community Member

Maybe it's just me.  I can't figure out why but since yesterday, I now cannot access Nest on my desktop.  I can access it on my phone but on desktop, it just keeps asking me to log in with my Google account - there is only one and I select it and attempt to proceed but it just returns me to the lame log in message.  Anyone else having this issue?

 

ShawnT
Community Member

@boatdude 

It's working fine for me here.

 

Johnsy
Community Member

@ShawnT  Hi mate, my nest batt cams are fairly new without the floodlight and i have them hardwired. Yes they record 24/7 and you can view it for 28 days if you have nest+ but you can only download "events" so make sure you tick all the options for detection, cars,movment.people.animals etc.. and bump up the recording time and quality.  Would be nice to clip and download whatever you want from your p.c that was my first question on this forum and was promised by Google early 2022.. 

boatdude
Community Member

@ShawnT Thanks.  It resolved after 2-3 days with no changes on my part.  I checked several "down report" sites and Nest login issues had a definite spike at same time I had issue.

 

GoBananas
Community Member

Where is that Google Home app web interface? This is a serious need. Why has this not been addressed yet?

flug
Community Member

@GoBananas because they don't care. 

Kickemup5150
Community Member

I'm having problems with renewing my subscription after not having it for a year and they are not giving me 30 day free trial and they r rejecting my payment method which is the exact same method I used for 2 yrs with them.  I'm waiting for a response from them.  I'm about ready to cancel and never use nest aware account again m

 

Maslam
Community Member

We have tens of Nest App camera installed in our facility and we don't like to switch to google home app. We returned almost 5-6 newly purchased product that was not compatible with our existing Nest App.

Please advise where I can get Nest camera that works with Nest app.

Thank you,

Muhammad

MplsCustomer
Bronze
Bronze

@Maslam 

You can still find 1st generation Google Nest indoor and outdoor cameras on Amazon.  (The listings all seem to be labelled "1st generation".)  I wish we had known what we know now when we purchased our one Google Nest Camera (Battery) in September 2021 a week after Google Nest quit selling its 1st generation outdoor cameras.

Maslam
Community Member

we ordered it but they shipped us the newer model .

MplsCustomer
Bronze
Bronze

@Maslam 

I'm just another Google Nest customer, but if you purchased what was clearly labeled as a 1st generation Google Nest camera on Amazon, with text and photos, (like the links I found below), that seems like mis-representation and you should be able return it.

https://www.amazon.com/Nest-NC2100ES-Security-Weatherproof-Diagonal/dp/B07NS4NL9P/?_encoding=UTF8&pd...

https://www.amazon.com/Nest-Security-Matters-Anywhere-Outdoor/dp/B01I3I9L8M/ref=sr_1_3?crid=30QDNBTA...

Sveen
Community Member

I don't really care which app I can access the cameras from, although I would say the Nest app/site provides a much more professional, intent-focused portal for us users.  My biggest concern is about web functionality.  I specifically bought a Nest Floodlight Camera over the competitors because I knew my other cameras could be viewed via a webpage on PC.  Should I return it and ditch Nest products from my life?  I do not want a phone-only experience.

ShawnT
Community Member

@Sveen   I am in the same boat.  I have for now found a work around by using an android emulator on my desktop. While it lets me view the cameras on my desktop it's still just like using a phone. My real gripe here is that the old cameras and new cameras do not operate the same way on the phone/emulator and the nest app/desktop site. I can view the history of the old cameras on the phone but not in the same way as I can on nest. I've decided to keep them though for now.

NestCamLover
Community Member

@Sveen I bought the floodlight cam for the same reason.  It's a security cam and I wanted to have the live feed on my desk monitor.  I've already installed and sealed it so I'm just putting it up for now.  But because of the complete lack of updates from  @GoogleNestTeam for almost 9 months now, I'm buying Eufy products now.  No way is Google going to have a web interface for Google Home.

Chris-VT
Community Member

Google should be ashamed for branding these inferior pieces of junk as Nest products. They are NOT, they don't work with Nest app, they don't have 24/7 recall, scrolling,  PC accessibility, or anything useful.   Two apps are not the way.  Especially since you still cannot scroll or set zones like Nest did, seamlessly, on phone AND PC.

Very disappointed. 

@Rishi remember this?  "we are committed to bringing the experiences and Nest devices you have come to love in the Nest app into the Home app."

I see NOTHING that I love in the Home app.

honore14
Community Member

Amen @Chris-VT !

That had to be a conscious decision by this departments leadership to continue to brand products “Nest” knowing full well they did not work with nest app and it was deceptive to customers. 

I bought around $600 worth of “nest”  products at their Black Friday sale for new house I was moving to in a few months. Only discovered they weren’t compatible when I called customer service frustrated with not getting them registered on nest app. Then I’m told I’m outside the return window so stuck with useless products I refuse to use due to home app miserable experience. 

I’m going to make Bing my default search engine and safari default browser now…🤬

Webdog
Community Member

Having had a few past Nest products just bought a Nest battery camera and cannot get live feed working (and not compatible with Nest app with Google Home bring a dreadful Plato form.  So POOR Google. Would have expected more from you.  Will return product, cancel my existing nest subscription and will be looking at alternatives from other providers.

willeagle
Community Member

I just installed a wired floodlight nest cam and discovered that it won't work with the Nest App. I totally understand the rationale posted above, but I still do not agree with it. This is a classic unilateral Google decision that is blind to user experience and counter branding strategy. Guys: do better. This isn't acceptable.

sastring
Community Member

Please, I need to see my new Nest Cam Battery cameras on my PC.  I cannot get any good detail using my cell phone. I tried to stream to my TV via my google assistant (No Luck). We need the Goggle Home App to allow streaming to larger screens including the PC.

Thanks

EmptyNester
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

HI Sastring,  I'm an end user like you.   Honestly we have all been waiting for this for over 9 months now and so far Google has not made this feature available.  

My recommendation is to go on to eBay ( or where ever) and buy a used Gen 1 Nest camera and be done with it.    That is what I did about 7 months ago as I got tired of waiting for that feature and MANY others to come to the Google Home app.  

I hope this helps.

sastring
Community Member

Having been with tech companies most of my career, I'm wondering if the functionality we are requesting is patented by a competitor of google.  This often will cause delays in otherwise straightforward software fixes and functional additions.  I would be best for google to come out and say this, if that is the case.  It would calm the anger of many current Nest/Home users who are as frustrated as I am.  Then we would know they are working on it and to be patient.  We know the legal system is slow. We may not need to ditch our recent purchases.

MplsCustomer
Bronze
Bronze

The functionality we're requesting for our new Google Nest cameras and doorbells is merely the functionality already possessed by our older Google Nest cameras and doorbells.

sastring
Community Member

Google bought Nest Labs back in 2014. I'm wondering if there was some previous IP that didn't fully transfer to newer wholly owned Goggle products.  Just a thought.  Otherwise, I can't imagine google would mess-up this bad. 

EmptyNester
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

Hi Sastring,  I would think if there was an IP issue then they would have given this product line a new name.  The fact that they called these cameras "NEST" is an indicator to me that this is not an IP issue.  I don't know what is going on but something is definitely not good here.   As I scan all the normal rumor websites and especially REDIT, I don't see any indication that they even have a development team working on fixing Google Home when it comes to Security Cams.  If you look at the last 9 months not even one simple feature or enhancement that moves the functionality of the NEST app over to Google Home app has been released.  

Google also said back in October of 2021 there were be a new Doorbell cam released in 2022 to replace the current (mostly useless and flawed) Doorbell (Battery) and not a word has been said.  Nothing on of the rumor websites are evening talking about it or releasing early pictures.

I'm very discouraged here.  The actions do not support their words.

 

Irievibesender
Community Member

It has been 8 months and still no simple schedule function added to cameras in home app. This is horrible customer service and a simple feature that my 30 dollar wyze camera has. This makes them useless and notifications galore. Come on man get a dev team on this and give us schedules if your going to take away the nest app....

Irievibesender
Community Member

Stop spending time on pronouns and feelings of inclusion, Google, and more on your customer complaints and products/services  that are actually valid and in abundance on the SAME topics of needs/wants. You have no problem taking our hundreds of dollars...

boatdude
Community Member

Seems obvious at this point, due to complete lack of ANY response or action, that Google has simply abandoned the Nest camera line of business because they couldn't keep up with competitors.

NestCamLover
Community Member

This is my thought as well.  I have no trust they won't just suddenly abandon them like they did with the Nest Secure system.

BDG007
Community Member

The silence from Google on this continues to be deafening.

 

In light of this fact and with the thought of having to move to a new camera platform, does this community have ideas on what cameras and platform would best replace the Old Nest we all are USED to rely on?

Ben8362
Community Member

The real bummer is that Nest was best in class when looking at consumer grade cameras. I work in the surveillance industry and recommended them A LOT until last Fall. There's obviously Ring, Arlo, and Wyze in that space too, but they're still not great. At this point they may have surpassed Nest and deserve another look though.

If you want a cloud set up that's  a step up the jump in service cost is fairly substantial for something like Verkada, Meraki, or VIAAS. A lot of these would also require knowledge about Power Over Ethernet (POE) and hardwiring the cameras with ethernet cable or setting up your own WiFi connection on the camera if they don't support it out-of-the-box.

Other options would include a DIY setup using something like Milestone, which offers a free Video Management Software (VMS), but some of their features are behind pay walls. This would also require POE and basic networking knowledge.

Cloud Surveillance or Video Surveillance as a Solution (VSaaS) is a rapidly growing field though, so maybe someone new will step in to fill the void that Google apparently is less interested in occupying.

datx
Community Member

I'm guessing the integration of the old/new Nest product generations was started, but then got waylaid by the move to support Matter.

From coverage of Google I/O, appears the SDKs for developers arrives June 30, and then rollout across products and Google Home happens "later this year". 

This might explain the false starts and delays in getting everything to play nicely together (again).

EmptyNester
Gold Product Expert
Gold Product Expert

JayBoogieNC
Community Member

Does suck to have to click cameras in the Home app oh well c'est la vie!

SGBNDMC
Community Member

I see a lot of members posting in the community resources center but I never see an actual agent answering their posts

 

Maslam
Community Member

No response yet from google support on this issue, i think they need user to stop buying their product.

NestCamLover
Community Member

@GoogleNestTeamYou've lost me as a customer for any future Google products.  As far as I'm concerned you've run the Nest brand into the ground.  Used to be a superfan, now just disappointed with you dropping product support and absolutely zero communication.

Nest soon to be added to https://killedbygoogle.com/