cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Replies are disabled for this topic. Start a new one or visit our Help Center.

Low Battery Notifications for Nest Doorbell (Battery) disappeared, troubleshooting showed me why

ksizzle
Community Member

I have been in communication with the @MadeByGoogle X/Twitter account through DMs since July 26th 2023, about a month and a half of back and forth. I used to have a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra when those talks began. I've had a Nest Doorbell Battery for well over a year but starting sometime early this year, the critical alert for a low battery notification (once it falls below 20%) stopped being sent on the Google Home app. This was a useful alert as it would remind you to charge your battery once it got low. If you were to go on Google now and type in "google home low battery notifications" and clicked on the first thread you see on googlenestcommunity.com, you'll see that I'm not the only one with the issue. A user by the name of Thomas4 created a thread here with the same complaint and many others chimed in expressing the same issue. The thread is now locked so that's why I'm making a new one

I reached out to @MadeByGoogle and they had me troubleshoot a ton of things with no solution. It eventually got to the point where I got an entirely new phone, I switched from the aforementioned phone to the newly released Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold 5. The issue persisted, I would never get a critical alert when battery was low. They then asked me if I had friend or family member with a different phone to try testing and my brother has an iPhone so we tested with him(now the 3rd phone tested for this). Once it fell below 20%, he got the critical alert for low battery. But then we discovered his app was outdated by a year (around August 2022 was his Google Home firmware version). So we charged up the doorbell and updated his app to the latest firmware to run another test. This gave me an idea though. Since I know this problem didn't always exist and worked in the past, I uninstalled the Google Home app on my Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold 5, and downloaded the APK for the August 2022 version of Google Home and finally today the battery fell below 20% and both our phones got the notification of low battery!

So after almost 2 months of troubleshooting we narrowed down the issue = I believe something broke in the Android version of the Google Home app via an update sometime earlier this year to prevent critical alerts of low battery from being sent to users, to remind them to charge their doorbell. Older versions send the alert but the newer versions of the app do not on Android. iPhone seems to work fine regardless so this is an isolated issue for Android users. I reported all this to @MadeByGoogle and they gave me a feedback form where I let them know of the issue. I have no idea if that will reach the development team, so I wanted to make a thread here too and hope it catches the eye of someone who can properly report this to the dev team. I hope this gets fixed.

For now, I'm gonna stay on the older version of Google Home (2.57.1.8) until I know it's fixed

3 REPLIES 3

RenzJ
Community Specialist
Community Specialist

Hi ksizzl,
 

My apologies for the delayed response here. 
 

Thanks for posting and for sharing what you've done. We appreciate people who want to share their thoughts with us. We're always looking for ways to improve. Keep an eye on the Google Nest Community page for any updates. 

 

Also, you can Share feedback about Google Nest so our team will know your insights. Let us know if you have other questions or concerns.

 

Cheers,

Renz

mendy
Community Member

Hi Ksizzle,

I have an iPhone and the problem also exists with the latest version of the Google Home App.  I am using a Google Nest Battery, and two months or so ago I realized that I had stopped receiving notifications for "people events".  When I looked at the app, the camera battery was completely empty.  A toggle for low battery notification no longer exists in the Google Home App.  I've tried removing and reinstalling the app with no success either.  So something that google did to the Google Home app stopped the low battery alert from working.

Google, a fix please.  Or at least some kind of work around to restore this functionality.  The camera doesn't do me any good if I don't know that the battery is dead.  

RenzJ
Community Specialist
Community Specialist

Hello mendy,

 

We're sorry for any trouble this may have caused you. While we don’t have any details to share about the availability of this. We’ll take note of it and ensure that we'll learn from your experience as we continually improve our products and services. Keep an eye on the Google Nest Community page.

 

Best,

Renz