Google is preparing a redesign of the Home app that focuses in on Gemini and AI features, and I’m a little nervous about it, but still optimistic.
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As we reported on earlier this week, the latest Google Home app update sets the foundation for a big Gemini-centric revamp. This includes “Google Home Premium” and the first new Google smart speaker in years. But it also brings a surprise redesign to the Google Home app.
This new design is hiding beneath the surface of the latest Google Home app version, and it’s a little polarizing.
The new app drops down to just three tabs along the bottom – Home, Activity, and Automations. An “Ask Home” search bar shows up at the top, and the main Home page then shows your favorite devices as well as a new button to show the rest of the list of devices. The Settings, Inbox, and other displaced features are then offloaded to the profile overflow menu.
While not as big of a redesign as the Google Home app we’ve come to know since 2023, it’s still a big shift.
Google, with that 2023 redesign and its moves in the time since, has done a lot to improve on the experience of operating a smart home, and the solution it has created scales pretty well to bigger smart homes too. There are plenty of faults, definitely, but the overall product has felt pretty good to me, and I’ve been looking forward to seeing continued progress.
That’s why this redesign has me on the fence.
On the one hand, the power of Gemini has a lot of potential to improve the smart home’s faults. Between making it easier to search for events captured by your Nest cameras to taking the work out of making automations, the potential is massive.
On the other hand, I worry that the focus on AI will take away from the core parts of a smart home that, frankly, Google still needs to get better at.
As mentioned, Google has solved a lot of the sore points of running a smart home in the Home app, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Barely a month ago, Google literally had to acknowledge that, yes, the experience of using Home, and especially Assistant, has been chaotic. If you’re throwing AI into the mix, that opens a new door to a whole new kind of chaos. AI services, even Google’s, aren’t exactly known for being the most stable and predictable things.
That said, I’m overall optimistic.
The Google Home app redesign isn’t overbearing, at least based on the preview we’ve seen so far, when it comes to shoving AI down your throat. It balances the existing experience with one enhanced by Gemini and, if all goes perfectly, it might even be better than what we have today.
We’ll find out more in the coming weeks, but what do you think?
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