The Google Home app finally gets the full Material You treatment

Material You has been the main design language of almost all Google apps and products on mobile phones and more since it was first introduced in Android 12. There are a lot of ways that Material You allows users to personalize their devices, and perhaps the best of the lot is that it applies colors extracted from users’ wallpaper to other parts of their smartphones’ UI. It’s pretty cool, even though it has its detractors. Regardless, it has taken quite a long time for Google to apply all of its own design rules to all of its first-party apps, and the Google Home app is just now getting its final necessary touch of Material You.

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Google has finally improved the Home app, but it’s still got a long way to go

It’s still an improvement over the old design

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After three years of waiting for Material You to finally fully envelope the Google Home app, it’s actually happening. According to 9to5Google, the app is getting Dynamic Color theming, which is the feature that reflects your smartphone’s chosen color scheme. To see the feature before it is publicly rolled out, people must be a part of the Public Preview program, original article writer Abner Li said. Google Home isn’t the only app that has recently seen dynamic theming come to its interface in recent months, as Google Authenticator got its own splash back in November.

Home is where the Nest is

It’s been over a year since the Google Home app started absorbing Nest camera functionality from the old Nest app, and it wasn’t until November 2024 that we could say with confidence that Google Home’s app was a solid interface for Nest devices. That’s when Google began adding support for many Nest cameras that had launched as far back as 2015. With that expansion, Google itself said that there was no need to use the outdated Nest app anymore to manage almost all users’ devices. We tend to agree, but our approval of the Google Home app’s Nest integration does not come without criticism, however. We still can’t use the Supersight close-up tracking view that was available on certain Nest cameras through Google Home, and we really don’t know if that will change anytime soon.

The Google Home app’s final Material You injection comes shortly after the app’s redesign. Things have gotten much better for those that may have thrown their phones down in frustration while attempting to navigate Google Home’s old UI. It was clunky, cumbersome and annoying, but for many, it was a necessity. There’s still a long way to go, however, but recent new features across the entire smart home control ecosystem from Google have us excited about the future.