Google Home After Gemini: What 136 Bad Reviews Say (2026)

Google Home is the app that turns a billion installed speakers, displays, plugs and cameras into something you can talk to. Over the past year Google has been replacing the assistant behind it with Gemini. In the 4,000 most recent US Google Play reviews, 136 people write about what that swap did to their house.

This app has gone downhill fast ever since they added Gemini. Voice commands are less reliable and home automation is much worse not better. They need to roll back and try again with a team that actually uses this every day like I do.

Seriously guys, how can you mess up a perfectly working system? All my Google Home devices are close to useless after Gemini. They don't understand the easiest of commands anymore. I start my day with frustration and cursing because of my Google Nest devices.

The interesting part is not that people dislike the change. It is that the complaint has held the same share of every negative review for five straight months, which is a different kind of problem from a bad build.

What We Read

We pulled the 4,000 most recent US Google Play reviews for Google Home on 9 September 2026, along with the live store metadata. The listing shows 4.02 stars from 3,654,291 ratings on more than 1 billion installs. On the App Store the same app holds 4.56 from 1,360,209 ratings, a gap we come back to at the end.

Google Home collects reviews quickly, so those 4,000 cover 13 April 2026 to 8 September 2026, 147 days. Of them, 2,683 were 1-3 stars, and 1,340 were long enough to describe something at 120 characters or more. Every count below comes from those 1,340.

The rating distribution is the first thing worth writing down, because it is unusual for an app this large:

More than half of the recent reviews are one star, and the second largest bucket is five. There is almost no middle. That shape usually means people are not rating an app, they are rating an event that happened to them.

One caveat before the numbers. 1,317 of the 4,000 reviews we pulled were 4 or 5 stars, so the shares below are shares of complaints, not shares of customers.

Quick Answer: Did Gemini Make Google Home Worse?

According to these reviewers, the voice layer got less predictable and the app got slower, and there is no supported way back. A keyword screen for Gemini returned 153 of the 1,340 substantial complaints. We read all 153 and removed 17 that were not about the swap: 6 quote Gemini as a chatbot they asked for help, 5 are people who want Gemini and have not been given it yet, 5 praise it or report an improvement, and 1 is about a different Gemini product entirely. That leaves 136 verified complaints, 10.1% of everything substantial, and 109 of them, 80.1%, are one star. Inside those 136, the largest single theme is not a broken feature. It is being pushed onto it: 38 reviews, 27.9%, describe being forced, nagged or given no opt out.

The Line That Does Not Move

If Gemini had shipped one bad build, the monthly share of Gemini complaints would spike and then fall. It does neither.

The band is 8.2% to 12.8% across five complete months with no direction. A flat line is the finding. A spike says a release broke something and an engineer can unbreak it. A flat line at one in ten says the thing people are describing is the design, and waiting for the next update is not a plan.

The overall score moves in the same undramatic way. The monthly average of every review we pulled runs 2.65, 2.55, 2.42, 2.35, 2.39 from April to August, with September at 2.61 on a partial month. That is a slow slide, not a cliff.

The Build Table Says the Same Thing

Google Play attaches the reviewer's installed build to most reviews. Here is every build with 100 or more reviews in our sample, in release order.

There is no rescue build and no disaster build. Fourteen releases sit between 2.08 and 2.90 and the worst two, 4.18.45.1 and 4.24.28.0, are four months apart. A version label records the build the reviewer had installed, which biases the table only one way, toward less precision, so a table this flat is telling you something real: the thing people are unhappy about survives every release.

1. Being Pushed Onto It Is the Biggest Complaint

Thirty eight of the 136, 27.9%, are not about a broken feature at all. They are about consent. Reviewers describe repeated prompts, prompts with no visible decline, and an assistant that changed without them agreeing to it.

I do not want Gemini (AI) integrated into my Google Home. There is no way to natively opt out of Gemini either.

Keeps integrating gemini. Not opposed to AI, but I'd like more freedom. Thing is, if you don't take gemini, it keeps pushing a dark pattern where you can accept it, or close the app. Thing is, I don't want or like gemini. I'll be uninstalling this app.

Used to be good, awful Gemini implementation is being forced now, they've disabled the Not Now button on Gemini prompts.

Since Gemini auto added itself, the entire Google Home system has been awful. Some of my devices just aren't recognized anymore, it takes minutes to respond and it doesn't work properly when it does respond. It should have been a choice to switch/include Gemini within the system

It was good until Google decided to push gemini on us and make the old assistant unavailable. Uninstalling as I neither need nor want gemini.

This is worth separating from the reliability complaints because it is the one Google could answer without shipping any code. Fifteen reviews, 11.0%, go further and ask specifically for a way back to Google Assistant.

please give us an option to go back to the Google assistant away from Gemini, Gemini got home feels like an Alpha at best.

Home used to be lovely but now Gemini has taken over, our bespoke assistants no longer have unique voices, and there is apparently no way to turn Gemini off or get our assistants back.

2. Routines and Automations

Thirty reviews inside the Gemini cluster, 22.1%, say a routine or automation that used to run does not run any more. Across the whole complaint set, 119 reviews, 8.9%, mention routines or automations at all.

Are automations for show, because I only see an option for sending notifications (which is useless). My routines show up in there but they don't work. They replaced Google assistant with Gemini and routines stopped working.

I use this app for years with both a night time and a morning routine. after the rollout of Gemini both routine stopped working properly, the morning routine doesn't work at all. so some of the products I bought to use are now pretty much worthless.

automations/scenes that worked previously no longer work. good work on breaking everything gemini

Destroyed all my automations, made so many ghost devices that i can not remove. The shift to gemini makes everything 10x slower

Since they forced Gemini to be the main assistant for Google absolutely nothing integrates and the routines don't work this might be the worst product in the whole world.

The reason this bucket hurts more than its size suggests is that a routine is the part people bought hardware for. A speaker that misheard one song is an annoyance. A morning routine that stopped firing is a set of devices that no longer earn their place.

3. It Got Slower

Twenty three reviews, 16.9%, describe delay: the app taking a long time to list devices, or a spoken command taking seconds to land. Thirteen of them name a number of seconds.

The Gemini upgrade is exceedingly slow. My devices have not changed. if I request my nest hub to turn off the lights it can take up to 30 seconds. And the performance of the app itself is also slow.

Gemini is buggy as hell as expected, but the worst part is it's just extremely slow at controlling devices. I have a Nest Audio. In a case of about 20 Hue bulbs connected via a bridge, it takes Gemini assistant up to 5 full seconds or more to turn things on

gemini ruined it like everything else. this used to be a fast and easy way to control my lights and fans but ever since they introduced Gemini to the home app it has slowed down and barely loads half the time.

4. The Failure Mode That Is Hardest to Diagnose

A smaller but distinctive group describes the assistant confirming an action it did not perform. This is only a handful of reviews in the English corpus, so we are not going to call it a cluster, but it is the failure mode readers should recognise because it looks like success.

Recently I've been experiencing significant delays with the lights responding, even when on the same WiFi network as the hub rather than cellular. Even on my Pixel Watch, I'm saying "lights off", Gemini claims the lights are now off, only they're not.

As I am sure you know by now going from the deterministic experience with assistant to the not so deterministic experience with Gemini is frustrating. Please fix this: when I ask Gemini to turn on a fan for thirty minutes. 70% of the time it turns the fan on and turns it of after 30 minutes. The rest of the time it turns on the device and says starting a time called "whatever the device name was" for 30 minutes and then after thirty minutes does not turn of the device only the time alert starts.

60% of ok Google commands get responded with "I am an AI assistant and I can't control your smart home devices" thanks Gemini you truly are as disappointing as I expected.

5. Alarms, Music and the Small Things

Nine reviews inside the cluster mention alarms, timers, reminders or broadcasts, and ten mention music, radio or podcasts. Small numbers, but they are the daily uses.

Useless since the Gemini integration. its not only slower. It's the third time in a row my google home device COMPLETELY forgot I had an alarm set at 7 am

This was great until it forced me to connect to Gemini AI. Now the Home Mini I have used for several years regularly doesn't play alarms that I have used for several years, and my cat has not been fed on time several nights this month because the alarm just did not ring.

Since this app changed from Assistant to Gemini it is too slow. It also misunderstands simple commands like "lights on".

What the Other 90% Are About

Gemini is the largest nameable cluster, but it is one tenth of the complaint set. The rest of the 1,340 is worth listing so nobody reads this piece as a claim that one feature explains a 4.02 rating.

That fourth row is the one we would investigate next. Ninety nine reviews describe an app that cannot see hardware sitting on the same network, and 90 of those 99, 90.9%, are one star, one of the densest one-star concentrations in the whole corpus.

What People Tried

This is the part of a complaint corpus that tells you whether self service exists.

• 130 reviews, 9.7%, describe a reinstall, a cache clear, a factory reset, a reboot or an unplug.
• 131 reviews, 9.8%, say in so many words that whatever they tried did not change anything.
• 124 reviews, 9.3%, say they uninstalled, gave up, sold the hardware or moved to a competitor.

Those three numbers are almost identical, and that is the point. In this corpus the number of people who tried the standard fixes and the number who reported the fixes failing are the same size. Seventeen reviews inside the Gemini cluster name Alexa, HomeKit, SmartThings or Home Assistant as where they are going.

The feature has become much much worse since the swap to Gemini. Basically it's turned my Google Nest smart speakers into bricks! Useless!

it's gotten worse. says half my devices are offline, when they all work through their respective individual apps. No one wants your stupid A.I. Gemini. Just leave things that actually work alone.

This app asking for feedback then failing to load the feedback form is on brand for Google. Gemini for Home has stopped so many features from working Google should refund every paying customer.

The Same Complaint in Nine Languages

We repeated the pull across 24 Google Play storefronts. Three of them returned the exact reviews we already had, which is a known duplication in Play's international feeds. The remaining stores added 4,200 unique reviews we had not seen, 823 of them substantial negatives, and 105 of those name Gemini across 15 storefronts. German, Italian and Japanese lead.

The reason this matters is that a US-only reading of a Google product can always be dismissed as one market's taste. It is harder to dismiss the same sentence in nine languages.

German

Seit Umstellung auf Gemini funktioniert die Sprachsteuerung über unseren Google Home Mini extrem schlecht und enttäuschend! Das alte System hat viel besser funktioniert. Wir nutzen hauptsächlich Musik und Smart Home Steuerung.

German

seit der Umstellung auf Gemini funktionieren die Abläufe nicht mehr. das sollte überarbeitet werden aber dringend.

Italian

Su Samsung Watch Ultra 2 improvvisamente non funzionano piu i comandi per attivazione dispositivi impartiti con l'assistente digitale gemini. Non da messaggi di errore, anzi i comandi impartiti dice che sono stati eseguiti, ma in realtà non accade nulla.

Spanish

desde que funciona con Gemini es terrorífico. Muy lento, no entiende órdenes simples, interpreta lo que quiere. Una involución imperdonable.

Spanish

la experiencia con Gemini en los altavoces es mucho mucho peor que con Google assiatant, es una buena idea muy mal implementada, a mí me está restando salud por estrés por lo mal que funciona en comparación con cómo lo hacía Google assiatant.

French

de pire en pire, on est passé d une application géniale a un truc imbuvable, routine impossible a supprimer, appareil qui perd des fonctions, sans compter gemini qui ne comprend rien ou bien mets 2 heures a faire ce qu on lui demande. Google réveillez vous

Dutch

sinds de overgang naar gemini is het veel slechter. alarmen gaan op de verkeerde tijd en hij zegt geregeld dingen niet te kunnen die die voorheen wel altijd deed. speelt uit zichzelf muziek af terwijl er niet om is gevraagd. Ai maakt alles slechter

Portuguese

Recentemente, passou a demorar cerca de 15 a 20 segundos para LISTAR os dispositivos, já reinstalei, limpei cache e nada. Um atraso na vida, tem que usar gemini (que é de uma lentidão infernal também) pra tudo agora?

Japanese

高齢の父がGooglenesthubを使用しています。予定を管理するのに口頭で完結するので 入力操作が難しい父でも簡単に使えるので重宝していました。 しかし、アシスタントからGeminiに移行したあたりから急に予定を聞いても答えなくなりました。 Voicematchも何度も録音し直し、アカウントに基づく情報もオンにして、デバイスの初期化まで試しましたがやはり答えません。 以前は聴けていたradikoも聴けなくなりました。 フィードバックにも送っています。 早く改善していただきたいです。 何のために2台も購入したのか。残念でならない。

Japanese

Gemini for homeが既存のGeminiと別サービスになっていてカスタム指示や長期記憶が全く反映されない。Liveを利用するには課金が必要で、いざ開始したらLiveからは家電の操作ができない。新しいNestスピーカーを買って年間プランも入った。それでこの仕打ち。動作が早い分Alexaの方がまだ良かった。

Hungarian

31 eszközt kezel benne SmartLife, Xiaomi és Sonoff eszközökkel és két Google Mini hangszóróval. Elfogadhatóan. Rá erőltette a Geminit a hangszórókra avval, hogy visszaállítható, ha nem tetszik.

Indonesian

entah masalah di google gemini atau di google home, setelah update tidak bisa perintah suara smart device yg ada di rumah. padahal sudah relink dan sudah sinkronisasi ulang.

The Italian review is the clearest statement of the failure mode in section 4, in any language: the commands report as executed and nothing happens.

What This Does Not Show

Four limits, stated plainly, because a number without its boundary is a claim.

We measured Android only. On the App Store, Google Home holds 4.56 from 1,360,209 ratings against 4.02 from 3,654,291 on Google Play. That is a half star gap on a much smaller iOS base, and we did not read a single iOS review. We are not going to guess whether iPhone owners get a different assistant, a different app or a different tolerance.

These are the last 147 days, not the whole rollout. Gemini for Home reached different accounts and countries at different times, and several reviews here are people waiting for it rather than living with it. Our corpus starts in the middle of that story.

We counted mentions, not causes. A review that names Gemini and describes a broken routine is telling us what the reviewer believes. We can verify that 136 people wrote it down. We cannot verify that the assistant swap is what broke the routine.

We did not test anything. We did not set up a Nest speaker, time a light command or try to opt out. Everything here is what people wrote in a public store listing, counted and quoted.

Read the Full Breakdown

You can read the full negative review breakdown for Google Home on Android, or go straight to the trust check and apps like it. For the competitor these reviewers name most often, see why Alexa alarms stop firing and devices show offline. For the wider category, see Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings and Home Assistant compared. For the same "the app cannot find my hardware" complaint at two other brands, see Sonos not finding speakers and the Roku app not connecting to the TV. For a redesign that produced an almost identical bring-back-the-old-one cluster, see the Discord redesign, and for a first party app whose users describe the same forced migration, see Fitbit after the Google Health switch.