Google Home repeatedly removes Smart Life devices from rooms and moves them to “Linked to you”, despite devices remaining online and unchanged. This breaks room-based voice commands and appears to be triggered by Smart Life metadata refreshes.
Environment
Platform: Google Home
Integration: Smart Life (Tuya)
Devices: ~25
Home configuration stable for ~6 months prior to issue
Single Google Home household
Observed Behaviour
• Devices remain online and responsive
• Device names continue syncing from Smart Life
• Rooms remain defined in Google Home
• However devices repeatedly lose their room assignments
• Devices reappear under “Linked to you”
The behaviour repeats periodically (roughly every 30 minutes).
Impact
Room-based voice commands stop functioning correctly. For example:
“Hey Google, Utility off”
no longer targets devices in the Utility room because the devices have been detached from that room.
This creates a significant reliability issue for households relying on voice control for accessibility.
Suspected Cause
Google Home appears to treat Smart Life device metadata refreshes as new device entities rather than updates to existing entities. When the device object is recreated, the existing room association is discarded.
Suggested Improvement
Google Home should attempt reconciliation before discarding user configuration. For example:
• If provider + device name match, retain prior room assignment
• If device ID changes but capabilities match, remap the device
• If multiple matches exist, prompt the user once to confirm mapping
User configuration (rooms, names, routines) should be treated as persistent data and preserved wherever possible during third-party device resyncs.
Current behaviour causes large smart-home setups to require repeated manual reconstruction of room layouts whenever integration metadata changes.
