Editor’s take: Technology is supposed to make our lives easier – at least, that is what Big Tech tells us. However, there is a growing disconnect between what we are promised and what we are actually sold. This issue goes beyond Google Home. From smart speakers to smartphone keyboards, tech giants seem to be getting worse at the basics.

If your Nest Hub decided this week that your living room no longer exists, or your Google speaker insists on playing Spotify on every device in the house except the one you are in front of, you are not alone. Across Reddit, X, and Google’s support forums, frustrated users are reporting yet another wave of “unexpected issues” with Google’s smart home devices. Translation: nothing works, and nobody knows why.

Redditor Grumblegrim recently kicked off a thread on the Google Home subreddit titled “The Enshittification of Google Home.” He describes how his once-reliable Nest setup used to handle everything with ease but now struggles to understand even basic commands. In just 19 hours, the post is approaching 500 upvotes and has drawn hundreds of replies – most echoing the same frustrations and sharing their own stories of a smart home slipping further into dysfunction.

The Enshittification of Google Home
byu/grumblegrim ingooglehome

The specific complaints vary – disappearing devices, broken routines, vanished groups, smart home hubs behaving like haunted objects – but the theme is consistent. Google’s smart home platform feels less like a finished product and more like a semester-long group project where half the team stopped showing up. Some users have suggested that the lack of care and the buggy behavior in Google Home is an intentional move to get users to switch to upcoming Gemini-powered devices. They may have a point – just sayin’.

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byu/grumblegrim from discussion
ingooglehome

These complaints aren’t new. Google Home users have been living in this weird limbo for years now: occasional outages, sudden feature removals, rebrands, hardware shuffles. Two years ago, a Redditor complained their Nest Hub had been stuck on the boot screen for days, despite repeated attempts at factory resets. Another said their smart home only works if they physically unplug and replug everything every 48 hours – a modern spin on the classic “did you try turning it off and on again,” but scaled up to your entire house. Unfortunately, the frequency of problems is increasing, and Google’s responses are as vague as ever. “We’re looking into it.” Sure you are. Frustrated users are resorting to clever workarounds and homebrew replacements.

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byu/grumblegrim from discussion
ingooglehome

The whole thing would be funny if it were just “Google being Google,” but it’s more widespread. Apple’s autocorrect – once legendary for its precision – now seems to insert the wrong correction about 50 percent of the time, and refuses to spell scary words like “bomb” (“Bob”) and “shoot” (“shout”). Amazon’s Alexa – once a poster child for the smart home – now routinely fumbles basic requests or forgets devices entirely. Across big tech, these aren’t just isolated annoyances. They’re signs that industry fundamentals and standards are slipping.

the current iOS autocorrect is AWFUL
byu/GalacticDragon7 inios

Sure, Google’s AI division can play chess against itself and invent new languages. However, it still struggles to consistently recognize your living room lights. Yet we keep buying, reinstalling, and factory-resetting, hoping this time will be different. Perhaps the future of the smart home is not broken. Maybe this is just what it looks like.