Jimmy Westenberg / Android Authority

TL;DR

• Home users report receiving a message that “phone actions and automations will no longer be available starting in the first week of May.”
• Google does not appear to have publicly shared any notice of a change to how automations work.
• We’ve reached out to Google in the hopes of getting an explanation, but have not yet heard back.

Setting up your smart home can be a huge undertaking, configuring every last device just the way you like it — but once you have everything perfectly tweaked, you can just sit back and enjoy, right? Well, that’s sure what we’d like to believe, but we’re starting to get a little worried upon hearing reports of Google Home devices starting to tell users that they’re about to lose some critical functionality.

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Over the past day or so, we’ve started finding posts from Google Home users like evilwitch452 on Reddit or Gvaughn posting to the Nest Community, where they share the same tale: After completing an action, their device tells them, “just so you know, phone actions and automations will no longer be available starting in the first week of May.”

We have not been aware of any upcoming deadline for Google Home losing functionality like this, so that message is surprising to hear — and understandably, very distressing for users. We immediately reached out to Google for comment, but have yet to receive any response.

The idea of Google Home dropping support for automations just sounds wrong to our ears — after all, it’s been less than a year since we got that great new automation editor overhaul. That leaves us wondering whether the message itself went out erroneously, or whether it’s possibly referring to a more narrow use case that’s going away.

What exactly does Google mean by “phone actions,” anyway? Is this referring to Home commands that we initiate through Gemini or the Home app on our phones? Is this about using routines to adjust phone settings? The ambiguity makes it quite difficult to figure out exactly what Google’s talking about here.

And what about that first-week-of-May deadline? While we were in the process of researching this issue, Google posted a message to the Nest Community announcing a new “unified vision for Google Home \& Nest” — and it debuts this May. However, that sounds more like it’s just focused on reorganizing web content, and it’s not clear at all if it could be a component in this message users are getting.

For now, we’re just hoping Google responds and sheds some light on what’s actually happening here, because we would hate to start May with a broken smart home.

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