Google CRIPPLING its home ecosystem

[Sandawg]

I am writing to express my profound frustration and anger with the recent changes to the Google Home and Nest ecosystem. As a long-time and dedicated user who has invested significant time and money into your products—from speakers and displays to Nest cameras and thermostats—I am utterly infuriated by the deliberate removal of fundamental smart home capabilities.

What your company has done is inexcusable. You have abandoned a core feature of any modern smart home platform: individual presence-based automation. This is not a niche, advanced feature; it is a basic, foundational element that every single one of your competitors—Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, and even community-driven projects like Home Assistant—provides as a standard.

My routines are now broken. I can no longer create an automation that says, "When I (not my wife, not anyone else) arrive home, and it is after sunset, turn on MY lights in MY room and wake up my computer.. IN a  multiperson household  when EVERYONE leaves, and anyone arrives is useless.  Instead, I am forced to rely on a pathetic, binary, and unreliable "Home and Away" system that treats my entire household as a single entity. My own phone, which contains all the location data you could possibly need, is now a useless brick for the most important part of my smart home setup.

Why? Why would a company that is a world leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning make its products so demonstrably dumber? It is a colossal failure of product management and a complete disregard for the needs of your most engaged customers.

This is not a bug; it is a feature you have actively chosen to remove. You have taken a capable smart home platform and made it into a glorified voice assistant.

I am not the only one. The community forums are filled with hundreds of thousands of users expressing the same outrage. This is not a fringe complaint; it is a mass revolt. We have been loyal to your brand, invested in your hardware, and trusted you to maintain a functional ecosystem. In return, you have delivered a product that is buggy, unreliable, and less capable than it was two years ago.

You are betting that the "sunk cost" of our devices will prevent us from leaving. You are wrong. Because a free, open-source platform can use almost every device I own, the only thing I stand to lose is my frustration. I am in the process of migrating my entire smart home to Home Assistant, a platform that gives me the control and flexibility that you have so foolishly abandoned.

This is INFURIATING, and who is the product manager that makes these decision

[Sandawg]

I am writing to express my profound frustration and anger with the recent changes to the Google Home and Nest ecosystem. As a long-time an user who has invested significant time and money into your products—from speakers and displays to Nest cameras and thermostats—I am utterly infuriated by the deliberate removal of fundamental smart home capabilities.

What your company has done is inexcusable. You have abandoned a core feature of any modern smart home platform: individual presence-based automation. This is not a niche, advanced feature; it is a basic, foundational element that every single one of your competitors,Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings, and even community-driven projects like Home Assistant,provides as a standard.

My routines are now broken. I can no longer create an automation that says, "When I arrive home, and it is after sunset, set some scenes,  and wake up my computer etc,. Instead, I am forced to rely on a pathetic, binary, and unreliable "Home and Away" system that treats my entire household as a single entity. This is USELESS in a multi person household. I want MY scenes in my ROOM and my things to run when I arrive home not my wife's or children fo  My own phone, which contains all the location data you could possibly need, is now a useless brick for the most important part of my smart home setup.

Why? Why would a company that is a world leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning make its products so demonstrably dumber? It is a colossal failure of product management, who is the product manager??? and a complete disregard for the needs of your most engaged and loyal customers.

This is not a bug; it is a feature you have actively chosen to remove. You have taken a capable smart home platform and made it into a glorified voice assistant.

I am not the only one. The community forums are filled with hundreds of thousands of users expressing the same outrage. This is not a fringe complaint; it is a mass revolt. We have been loyal to your brand, invested in your hardware, and trusted you to maintain a functional ecosystem. In return, you have delivered a product that is buggy, unreliable, and less capable than it was two years ago.

You are betting that the "sunk cost" of our devices will prevent us from leaving. You are wrong. Because a free, open-source platform can use almost every device I own, the only thing I stand to lose is my frustration. I am in the process of migrating my entire smart home to Home Assistant, a platform that gives me the control and flexibility that you have so foolishly abandoned.

This is infuriating and frustrating. 

[arm_dpe · Accepted solution]

Thanks for sharing such detailed feedback — we understand how frustrating it is when a favorite automation suddenly stops working. Right now, Google Home only supports the shared Home/Away status, so there isn’t a way to trigger routines based on an individual arriving or leaving. A practical workaround is to add a motion or occupancy sensor inside your room. When you pass by it, it can trigger the lights (and other actions) without depending on your phone’s location:

• For simple “on when someone enters” behavior, a standard motion sensor works well.
  
• If you want lights to stay on while you’re sitting still, an mmWave or occupancy sensor (e.g., Aqara FP2, Hue occupancy) detects micro-movements and avoids false offs.
  
• You can also add conditions like only after sunset or only if Home = Away to keep things smart.

For per-person presence detection the best way to make sure your voice is counted is to file a feature request through the public Issue Tracker. Our team actively reviews those reports when prioritizing future work.

We really appreciate you raising this — feedback like yours helps shape improvements to Google Home & Nest!