I can’t believe how awful the Google Home app is right now

Summary

Google’s Home platform is experiencing connectivity issues with various third-party smart home devices.
Complaints on Reddit about disconnections from the Google Home app led to Google acknowledging the issue (there’s still no solution yet, though).
Belkin will stop supporting Wemo smart plugs on January 31st, 2026.

A few weeks ago, I attempted to turn on my living room lamps with the Google Home app on my iPhone 16 Pro. The lamps are plugged into relatively recently released Wemo smart plugs that can sometimes be a little delayed, but to my surprise, they didn’t respond at all, even through my Nest Audio and voice commands.

The next day, the smart plugs still didn’t flip on, so I tried to remove and re-add them to the Google Home app, only to uncover this Reddit thread with hundreds of posts about the same problem. If you’re familiar with the world of smart home devices, outages like this aren’t that uncommon, so I assumed the issue would get fixed at some point. But after briefly reconnecting to my various Wemo smart plugs, they once again dropped from the Home app and Google Assistant voice commands a few hours later.

Making the situation worse, Belkin, Wemo’s parent company, then announced that it’s dropping support for the smart plug brand on January 31th, 2026. It’s not clear why, but it appears maintaining the connection to Google’s Home app and Alexa just isn’t worth it for the accessory maker (the smart plugs will reportedly still work with Apple’s HomeKit). Hopefully, this isn’t the start of a new trend with third-party smart home devices.

If your Philips Hue lights disconnect from Google’s Home app, here’s what you need to do

I thought smart lights were supposed to make life easier?

The Google Home app’s third-party device issues seem to be widespread

It’s not great when your smart lights won’t turn on

It’s not just Wemo either. Nearly all of my smart home accessories, ranging from the several Philips Hue smart lights I have throughout my home (which are usually pretty reliable), to iRobot’s robot vacuums and several smart thermometers, have all recently dropped their connections from the Google Home app and Google Assistant; and I’m not alone with these issues.

The wave of complaints on Reddit related to rampant Google Home app disconnections caught the attention of Anish Kattukaran, Google’s Director of Product Management, Google Home and Nest, who stated that the tech giant is working on a fix in a recent post on X.

Smart home products aren’t usually the kind of gadget you want to wait to get magically fixed with a server-side update, as you kind of need to be able to turn your lights on and off. In fact, the issue has gotten so bad that I’ve considered abandoning Google’s Home ecosystem and likely the majority of my smart home devices altogether. The convenience of quick voice commands just doesn’t seem worth it when they don’t work consistently.

This is especially disappointing because Google’s Home ecosystem once felt like the most reliable smart home platform out there. To be fair, they all sort of suck, including Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem, but Google’s Home platform seemed like the easiest to use and the most reliable. Part of me isn’t surprised given the slow, painful demise of Google Assistant over the past few years as Gemini, Google’s fancy AI chatbot, pulls the majority of the tech giant’s resources.

Hopefully, Gemini makes its way to Google’s Nest and Home smart speaker in the coming months, and these frustrating issues become a distant memory. Or, maybe Apple’s next-gen Siri will show up to save the smart home day.

Some people have found success in navigating to the Google Home app’s Settings and selecting Works with Google. You can then re-sync or re-add each third-party device. Unfortunately, in the case of Wemo and some of my other smart lights, this solution hasn’t worked for me. That said, I’ve had my Wemo smart plugs randomly reconnect to the Home app a couple of times over the past few days.