This Google Home update just improved your camera and phone’s battery life
Google Home’s app just got new battery-saving widgets and camera fixes
by Bethan Morgan · T3
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Google has updated its Home app with battery-efficient widgets and security camera fixes.
The new widgets in the Google Home app will pause background updates and other features when your phone screen is off to save battery life.
Google has just updated its Home app with new battery-efficient widgets, improved security camera live streams and multi-account switching, among other upgrades. The main update is its new Home widgets that are designed to improve your phone and camera’s battery life and efficiency.
Thanks to this update, widgets in the Google Home app will now pause background updates and polling when your phone’s screen is off, locked or showing a screensaver. After you’ve unlocked your phone, your Home widgets will refresh immediately so they’re always available to you.
This widget update is designed to help save battery life on your phone and connected cameras, which leads us nicely on to Google’s new camera fixes for both Android and iOS devices. For Android, the Google Home app has improved its live stream tile to make them more reliable.
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Previously, Android users have reported issues when returning from their full-screen camera view to the Favorites tab. The feed would turn black temporarily until users would scroll manually to bring it back. Live feeds should now stream seamlessly without any interruptions or blackouts when returning to different tabs and screens.
Also for Android, video timeline scrolling is now smoother, and allows you to scroll past offline gaps or unrecorded clips. Some users reported that this would cause freezing problems previously, but this now appears to be fixed.
For iOS users, the ‘Live’ button has been fixed. Previously, tapping ‘Live’ while watching recorded events would fail to redirect properly and would pause playback. This update should allow for smoother and faster switching.
Speaking of switching, Google has made it a lot easier to switch between multiple accounts that you use with Google Home. This should now be a much smoother experience, and result in less ‘Home not found’ errors and resets.
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Google has also improved set-up and onboarding for smart devices, and improved tile statuses for gadgets like cameras, sensors and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. These would often show as greyed out but this new update should show these titles in their active status without reloading.
It’s not completely clear when these Google Home updates are being rolled out, although some Home app users have started to notice changes.