Google has updated its Home app with a more battery-efficient widget and a batch of camera fixes.
The refreshed widget now pauses background polling whenever a phone’s screen turns off, locks, or switches into a screensaver, and it resumes refreshing only once the device is unlocked again, a change that extends battery life without sacrificing the widget’s always-available convenience.
Alongside the widget, Google has extended the same battery-saving logic to camera hardware paired with the Home app, a detail confirmed alongside a wider set of live-stream and playback fixes rolled into the same update.
Camera and app-wide fixes
Among those fixes, Google has made the live stream tile more reliable and corrected an issue where the feed previously turned black when users returned from the full-screen camera view to the Favourites tab until they scrolled manually. That same update also smooths video timeline scrolling past unrecorded or offline gaps, while iOS users gain a separate fix for the Live button, which previously paused playback of recorded events instead of jumping to the live feed.
Beyond the camera experience, this release strengthens multi-account switching within the Home app and cuts down on the “Home not found” errors and preference resets that had previously disrupted users managing multiple properties or households. Smart device setup also becomes smoother, since the update removes stalls that previously interrupted Wi-Fi pairing, and clearing smoke alarm or carbon monoxide detector notifications now correctly updates the device’s status within the app.
Google TV also benefits from this update, which resolves crashes that some users had reported during startup, alongside a fix for detector tiles that previously appeared greyed out for online sensors, cameras, and smoke or carbon monoxide detectors after leaving device controller screens.
Google has not confirmed a full rollout timeline for the update, though the changes are already reaching the Home app and the Gemini for Home voice assistant across supported devices, following the wider rollout of the assistant’s expanded compatibility with outside AI agents this week.
