Google Home Redesign: What's New and What's Improved
Some Context: I've Used Google Home Since Day One
I've been a Google Home user since the original puck-shaped speaker launched in 2016. I've lived through every iteration of the app, every rebrand, every promise of "things are about to get way better." So when Google rolled out its major redesign of the Google Home app, I approached it with the enthusiasm of someone who's been burned before but can't quit the ecosystem because they have 14 Nest devices hardwired into their house.
After using the redesigned app daily for several months now, I have thoughts. Some of them are positive. A few are frustrated. And at least one involves me staring at my phone trying to find a setting that used to take two taps and now takes six.
What Genuinely Got Better
The Home Screen Finally Makes Sense
The old Google Home app felt like it was designed by someone who had never actually used a smart home. Your devices were buried in room lists, and doing something simple like turning off the living room lights required tapping through two or three screens. I ended up using voice commands for almost everything just to avoid the app.
The new home screen puts your favorite devices front and center in a customizable grid. I have my four most-used lights, my thermostat, and my front door camera right at the top. One tap to toggle a light, one tap to see the camera feed. This sounds basic, and honestly it should have been this way from the start, but the improvement in daily usability is significant.
The key is that you have to actually configure your favorites. Out of the box, it shows a semi-random selection of your devices. Spend 10 minutes dragging things into the right order and it becomes genuinely useful.
Device Controls Are Faster and Cleaner
Tapping on a light now gives you a clean visual slider for brightness and a color wheel if it's a color bulb. The old UI had a tiny slider that was hard to grab with your thumb, especially when you were bleary-eyed at midnight trying to dim the bedroom light. The new controls are bigger, more touch-friendly, and just feel better.
Thermostats got a nice upgrade too. You see the current temperature, target temperature, and current mode all on one screen without scrolling. The old version required tapping into a sub-page to see half of this information. Small change, big daily improvement.
Camera feeds load faster in the new app, and the live view pops up as a preview without fully loading the stream. This is great for quickly checking the front door camera. In the old app, tapping on a camera meant waiting 5-10 seconds for the stream to initialize. Now I get a snapshot almost instantly and can tap into the full live view if I need it.
The Automation Editor Is Actually Usable Now
This is the biggest improvement, and the one that surprised me most. Google Home's "Routines" used to be embarrassingly limited compared to what you could do with Alexa or, obviously, Home Assistant. Creating anything beyond a basic "when I say good morning, do these three things" was painful or impossible.
The new automation editor uses a visual flowchart-style layout where you can see your triggers, conditions, and actions laid out logically. You can add time-based conditions, device state conditions, and chain multiple actions with delays between them. It's not Home Assistant-level flexible, but it's gone from "barely functional" to "good enough for most people."
I rebuilt my morning routine in the new editor and was able to add a condition I'd wanted for years: only run on weekdays. The old app technically supported this but buried it so deep that I'd given up and just had the routine run every day, manually canceling it on weekends by yelling "Hey Google, stop" from bed. The new editor made it a two-tap addition.
Spaces: Actually Not Just a Rebrand
I rolled my eyes when Google renamed "Rooms" to "Spaces." It felt like the kind of thing a product manager does to justify their quarterly OKRs. But the actual functionality change is worth acknowledging: devices can now belong to multiple Spaces, and Spaces don't have to correspond to physical rooms.
I created a "Movie Night" Space that includes the living room lights, the TV, and the soundbar. A "Work Mode" Space has my office lights, the office speaker, and the thermostat zone for my side of the house. This kind of logical grouping based on activity rather than location is something Home Assistant users have had forever, and it's nice to finally see it in Google's app.
What Got Worse or Is Still Missing
Where Did That Setting Go?
Google's redesign philosophy seems to have been "make common things easier, make everything else harder to find." Need to rename a device? It used to be in the device's main settings page. Now you tap the device, tap the gear icon, scroll down, tap "Device information," and find the name field buried in there. It's not a setting I change often, but when I need it, I spend two minutes hunting for it every time.
The same goes for adjusting speaker equalizer settings, changing a device's WiFi network, and managing device groups. All of these have been shuffled into sub-menus that aren't intuitive. The first time I tried to change the bass on my living room speaker group, I genuinely gave up and Googled how to do it in the new app.
Household Routines Were Missing for Months
When the redesign first launched, household routines, the kind that any household member can trigger, were simply gone. Only personal routines worked. Google said they'd bring them back, and they eventually did, but being without them for weeks was a real problem. My "goodnight" routine that anyone in the family could trigger stopped working, and I had to create duplicate personal routines for each household member as a workaround.
This is the kind of thing that erodes trust. When a major platform update removes features you depend on, even temporarily, it makes you wonder what's going to disappear next.
Third-Party Device Support Is Still Hit or Miss
I have a mix of Google Nest devices and third-party products connected through the Google Home app. The Nest devices work flawlessly in the redesign, as you'd expect. Some of my third-party devices lost features in the transition. One of my smart plugs used to show energy monitoring data in the Google Home app and no longer does. A couple of my lights lost their scene/preset options. The functionality still exists in the manufacturers' own apps, but the whole point of a unified home app is not having to open five different apps to control your house.
Matter Promised More Than It Delivered (So Far)
Google heavily promoted Matter compatibility with the redesign, and yes, you can add Matter devices more easily now. But the actual experience of using Matter devices in Google Home is still rough. I added a Matter-over-Thread light switch, and it works for on/off. But advanced features like scene management and firmware updates still require the manufacturer's app. Matter was supposed to be the "it just works" protocol, and right now it's more like "the basics work."
The Honest Daily Experience
After several months of daily use, here's where I've landed: the redesigned Google Home app is better for the things I do 20 times a day (toggling lights, checking cameras, adjusting the thermostat) and worse for the things I do once a month (device settings, network management, troubleshooting). Since the former category is far more common than the latter, the net experience is positive.
The automation editor alone would justify the redesign for me. I've created more routines in the last few months than I did in the previous two years combined, simply because the tool is no longer painful to use. The "Movie Night" routine that dims the lights, sets the TV input, and adjusts the thermostat was something I'd wanted to build for ages but never bothered because the old editor was so clunky.
But I'm still frustrated by Google's tendency to ship updates that remove existing features and add them back later. And the third-party device experience reminds me that Google's home platform is still primarily designed to sell you more Nest hardware, with everything else as an afterthought.
My Advice
If you're already in the Google Home ecosystem, the redesign is a net positive and you don't have a choice anyway since it updates automatically. Spend the time to customize your favorites and rebuild your routines in the new editor. It's worth the initial 30 minutes of setup.
If you're choosing an ecosystem from scratch, the redesigned Google Home app is now competitive with Alexa for casual smart home users. It's still not in the same league as Home Assistant for power users, but it doesn't pretend to be. For someone who wants to control their lights, thermostat, and cameras from one reasonably good app without tinkering with YAML files, it gets the job done better than it used to.
If you're an Apple household, this redesign doesn't change anything. HomeKit and the Apple Home app are still a better fit for you, and Google's ecosystem still doesn't play nicely with Apple's. And if you're a tinkerer who wants full control, Home Assistant is still the answer it's always been.
What I'm watching for next: Google has been hinting at more AI integration in the Home app, including natural language device control and predictive automations. If that materializes in a useful way, it could be the thing that differentiates Google Home from the competition. But I've been hearing "AI will make Google Home amazing" for long enough that I'll believe it when my lights actually respond to it.