Google has rolled out a Nest Hub update that refreshes the user interface of the smart home device to feature a Pixel 6 style Material You look. The problem is, it can throw some Nest Hubs into a boot loop.
This happened to my Google Nest Hub last night. I noticed the problem when I walked into my bedroom ready to bark at the Hub to set my morning alarms, when to my own alarm I saw it was rebooting and taking a heck of a long time to do so.
The Nest Hub appeared stuck on the four rotating dots of the initial booting/restarting process, with no sign of fully starting up.
Now I’m not a man flush with patience and decided to yank out the power cable, immediately shutting off the Nest Hub. I had half suspected this might cause more problems than it might solve. But to my surprise the Nest Hub booted up properly and greeted me with the newly updated interface.
It's never sensible to remove the power from a device while an update is being applied, so I wouldn't necessary recommend you follow my lead. But that said, others have reported the same trick working.
Either way, this really isn’t a great look for Google, which will almost certainly need to dig through the update and purge any code gremlins causing this boot loop problem. Hopefully, the rather direct fix won’t cause any larger problems down the line.
As for the update changes, they add in a more tile-like design with pastel colors not dissimilar to the look and feel of the Pixel 6 and Google Pixel 6 Pro interfaces.
When you swipe down from the top of the screen, you’ll now be greeted by a quick settings tab rather than the Home control tab, and these settings also have a panel for controlling nearby Nest Hub-compatible devices. Swiping up from the bottom opens up an app drawer, rather than the settings strip.
Overall, these are some neat tweaks but it's not an update that’ll revolutionize your Nest Hub use. However, the smart home hub is a pretty solid device anyway, to the extent that it doesn't really need much done to it in the way of major upgrades. After all, it does sit atop our list of the best Google Home-compatible devices.
