Google’s Home app, a command center for the smart home, gets a Gemini upgrade

Summary

Google admits that its Google Home app for managing smart home devices has not offered the best experience, and it now aims to change that. On Wednesday, alongside new Nest devices and an upcoming Google Home smart speaker, the tech giant also unveiled a redesigned version of the Google Home app that it promises will work better, centralize device management, and bring its AI assistant Gemini AI into the experience. While AI may be the headline feature about what’s new with the Google Home app, the app itself has had an overhaul, in design, performance, and reliability, Google claims. “I want to be very direct, the Google Home app has not been the experience that we’ve always wanted it to be,” Anish Kattukaran, Chief Product Officer at Google Home and Nest, told reporters in a briefing ahead of today’s news. So before the company could work on adding new AI features, it had to solve the app’s other problems, he said. Image Credits:Google “Number one was performance,” he said. “Performance is definitely a journey. We are not at the destination…It’s got to continue to evolve.” Over the past several months, Google says it’s made some major improvements, leading to 70% faster startup, 80% fewer crashes, and other battery and memory improvements. Over the past year, it’s also shipped over 100 performance updates and app features to the app, which today works across over 800 million devices from more than 50,000-plus OEMs, meaning companies that make devices compatible with Google Home. (Google had announced support for 750 million devices at its developer conference back in May 2025). Image Credits:Google Nest comes ‘Home’ In addition, the company is working to make the Google Home app the only app Nest users need to manage their devices, more than a decade after the company’s 2014 acquisition of the device maker. Over the years that followed, Google has slowly and iteratively been bringing Nest app features to Google Home, and now feels that journey is complete. (The Ne...