Nest Cam updates bring new features and much-needed fixes to the Home app

Google’s Nest brand has had a tough time winning people over lately. Price hikes for Nest Aware subscriptions and complaints about the reliability of the Home app have left plenty of customers grumbling. However, Google is trying to shift the narrative with a batch of new camera features and performance improvements.

In a new post on the Google Nest Community blog, the company outlined several changes rolling out in the Home app. One of the tweaks is the addition of preview snapshots in camera tiles. Instead of staring at a blank tile while waiting for live video to load, you’ll now see a static image from the last session, making it quicker to identify which feed you’re looking at.

Google has also added gesture controls for navigating footage. A swipe left or right toggles between the timeline and events list, while swiping down on the control bar expands or collapses the player window. A further downward swipe dismisses the camera entirely and takes you back to the overview screen.

Another handy upgrade is quick seek. By double-tapping the left or right side of the video player, you can now skip backward or forward by ten seconds when reviewing recorded events. It’s a small addition, but one that makes browsing through footage much faster.

Notification previews are also getting smarter. On iOS, you can press and hold to see an animated event preview, while Android users can tap the expand arrow to view a short clip. The goal is to give you a better idea of what triggered an alert without loading the app fully.

Alongside those new features, the update promises several performance boosts. Google says camera live playback should now be more reliable, with fewer “no video available” errors and reduced latency before the first frame loads. Streams should also recover properly if you power-cycle a camera mid-session — something that previously caused a frustrating “Camera Unavailable” message. Owners of original Nest Cam, Nest Cam Outdoor, and Nest Doorbell devices should also see substantial gains in upload speeds, encoding quality, and reliability.

These upgrades arrive after years of complaints that the Home app doesn’t match the smoothness or functionality of the now-retired Nest app. Google acknowledges that it hasn’t always hit the mark but insists that these improvements are based directly on user feedback from the Public Preview program.

The timing is notable, too. Just yesterday, we saw leaks pointing to a refreshed lineup of Nest hardware. It includes new indoor and outdoor cameras plus a third-gen Nest Doorbell, all with Gemini integration and 2K HDR video. With new devices on the horizon, today’s software improvements look like part of a bigger effort to convince people that Nest still has a future.

Google says more camera updates are already in the pipeline. In the meantime, anyone eager to try features before they’re broadly available can sign up for the Public Preview program through the Home app.