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
