Google commits to Home upgrades following major backlash

Although Google Home has been getting steady upgrades over the past few years such as video forwarding support, new smart home widgets, and gadget integrations with Gemini, customers aren't really pleased with the product's current state. Recently, Google Home and Nest users banded together to complain about their product experiences on Reddit.

A Reddit mega-thread focusing on the enshittification of Google Home cites numerous anecdotes emphasizing the degraded experience of the smart service. Some have cited repeatedly getting errors when asking Gemini in Google Home to do the most basic of tasks. Others have complained about routines like "movie time" that have randomly started recommending local movie times instead of turning off or lowering the brightness of the lights in their room, as the user has configured it to. There are some who have claimed that Google Home proceeds to turn off the room lights instead of turning off the fans like it's been asked to.

The leading theory in the Reddit thread is that this ongoing enshittification of Google Home products is just a part of the company's strategy of planned obsolescence of its existing hardware. They believe that since this degradation began when Google started investing more into AI services, the firm plans to make its current hardware seem worse than the products it plans to reveal next. It's likely that the next Google Home launches will feature more deeply ingrained AI capabilities.

That said, Google Home and Nest's Chief Product Officer Anish Kattukaran has now attempted to allay some of these fears by apologizing for the current product experience on X (formerly Twitter). The executive has emphasized that Google is actively listening to feedback and that it will improve the reliability of its smart devices as a part of a long-term solution. Kattukaran has also noted that his team is working on "major improvements" that will be announced this fall.