Please help confirm that Nest Indoor 2nd Gen was indeed ruined?

[CEDTZ]

I've been using Nest Indoor cameras I think for at least 10 years or whenever they first were released.  I've bought 20 of them over the years.  Just recently I was forced into upgrading some of my Dropcam Pro's into the Nest Indoor 2nd gen, and upon receiving them, got the bad news that I can no longer download footage to my hard drive locally based on my own 1 hour selection?  Nest Indoor 1st gen you could download 1hr clips for the exact timings you needed.  This current one doesn't work with nest app and doesn't appear to have any download feature whereby I can download what I select.  

First thought was that the simple solution is simply return them on amazon and then order the 1st generation ones, but then the concern is that they will soon disallow those as well like they did the Dropcam Pro?  

I'm returning the 4 I just received anyway, just a question of what to replace it with.  The fail is strong with this one, google.  

[EmptyNester · Accepted solution]

Hello, I'm an end user like you.  I also have been using Nest cams for about 10 years.

So YES, the new Gen 2 games only work with the Google Home app.  But there is a way to download clips up to 5 minutes long.  Go into the app and view a recorded clip. Make sure you are viewing the vertical TIMELINE where you can scrub the video.  drop the play marker somewhere in the timeline so you are viewing recorded video.  Then click on the 3 horizontal lines in the lower right corner and you should see a SAVE CLIP button.  From there the rest is clear.   It saves the clips to your phone Photo library.

I have a combination of both the Gen 1 and Gen 2 cameras but I still purchase the Gen 1 cams used from Ebay sellers and for me that has worked out great.   They have made a lot of advances in making  the Google Home app have a lot of features but it still isn't a powerful as the Nest App.   I do not believe they will drop the Gen 1 cams anytime soon. Just my opinion.   However if you want to consider switching to another platform check out the products from EUFY.   The only reason I don't switch to EUFY is because when t comes to viewing from a computer browser you are limited to LIVE viewing only.  You cannot watch recorded clips from the browser.  

Hope this helps.

[CEDTZ]

Yeah, I need to purchase the gen 1 nest cams, a 5 minute downloaded clip sucks.  I need to return all the nest cams that I bought and replace with gen 1.  Google fail.