Everything You Need To Know About The Home App

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about Home lately. Yes, the all-knowing oracle tells you what’s coming up in your day and fills the room with the sounds of whales if you so desire. But there’s another Home you need to understand. It’s an app with the same name, although it does more than work with your living room answer box. The Home app is essential because it does many things, such as connecting to your physical Home device. Finding apps for Chromecast and giving you customization for what you get from the Assistant. It’s an essential app, but it’s also kind of a convoluted mess. That’s why we’re offering a rundown of the critical features the Home app will show you. You’ll need to pay extra attention to find the functionality and how to use it.

A New Home

Suppose you have a Chromecast, Chromecast Audio, Home, or a device with Chromecast support like an Android TV. In that case, you’ll need the Home app. The central hub serves as a suggestion screen dashboard for everything you can do with those products. As indicated, it’s a must-have if you have any of the hardware, as mentioned earlier. Get some goodies like OK, play excellent songs, or launch Netflix. And you’ll need to connect your accounts to various services.

home 2 — If you have a Home or Chromecast, you’ll need this app for setup and maintenance.

If you have a Home or a Pixel, this app is an excellent resource to keep up with the expected list of commands you can issue to the Assistant. From the slide-out menu screen, touch things to Ask, or you can browse many of the different capabilities of your devices.

home 1 — Get the rundown on everything the Assistant can do.

Expect the gap to close over time in the Assistant on the pixel compared to Home. But for the time being, Home will have more intelligent home controls, and you’ll learn about new capabilities from this app.

Finding Content

It has tried to create something akin to the dashboard experience you’d get from a streaming device. It does fine for popular services like YouTube and Netflix but doesn’t quite pull in as much from all the other apps out there launched by cable channels and sports networks.

home 3 — The Home app is a starting place for things to watch, and comms to issue for the Assistant.

It’s one of the reasons that if you’re a cord cutter, an actual dashboard like Android TV is superior to a Chromecast. You have to hunt and peck your way around your phone to find something to watch.
The search feature is generally applicable, primarily for finding YouTube videos or specific television shows or movies. A subscribe caption will be below programming accessible through some subscription services, like HBO Now.
Finding sports content is more of a challenge. A search for warriors turns up a bunch of movies soaked in blood. Your best bet is to head directly to the service you’re most comfortable with, like Netflix, Hulu, Play Movies, or ESPN, then hit the cast button to start watching.

There’s More Crammed In There

One of Home’s frustrations is that many different functions are in the app; they’re not necessarily easy to track down. As you scroll through the Discover section, you’ll find it’s a weird hybrid of apps to integrate with Home tips for launching the Assistant. With ways to find programming that works with Chromecast.

home 4 — If you need some suggestions for finding stuff to watch, the Home app is ready to help.

The more straightforward stuff you need to know about it is in the slide-out menu. If a piece of connected hardware goes wonky. Touch the device, and you can reboot it or view other settings.
Another layer deeper in Home settings allows you to personalize the Assistant. Connecting Smart Home hardware or changing which services you get from your news briefing.
You can also enable Guest mode, which allows anyone to connect to your Home without being on your Wi-Fi network. It’s handy for letting someone play around with Home without giving them the keys to the kingdom.

home 5 — Share your Home with others in a quick easy manner.

You can get to it in other ways. There’s also access to your shopping list that the Assistant creates in Keep. You start telling it to add items through a voice comm. All this is taking the Home in the name of this app. It’s for your interactions with services around the house, an ambition that will only grow.

The New Home Hub

As the Assistant rolls out to more hardware. I suspect the Home app will be even more centralized on your device. In the meantime, there’s still some overlap between this app and the standard app.
But that’s kind of how it rolls out products. It’s a scattershot effort at first with duplications of service, then things get smoothed out over time. No matter how that turns out, the Home app will play a role.