Google Home has never allowed for a rudimentary all-or-nothing approach when it comes to managing household members. You can grant someone full access to your smart home devices or none at all. Based on recent UI tweaks, Google is looking to change this and may soon introduce different levels of access levels.

When you go to Google Home settings -> Household, you get a list of all the people in your house with the usual option to invite another person. What’s new is what you see when you tap someone on the list, including yourself. The new page shows you a person’s access level and the devices they can control: Access details and Devices. Today, it’s still an all-or-nothing approach. Press the Access details The entry only shows you a new page with an explanation that “all members of this house can view all activities and access all devices and settings”, so everyone has the role of a Director. The same goes for the Devices menu, although it also lists all the smart devices in your home.

Implementing these tweaks just for the sake of the change wouldn’t make much sense, and the way the interface is structured, it’s just intuitive to assume that more granular options are ahead. And sure enough, 9to5Google has spotted channels in September that say exactly that. The code suggests that you will have the option to grant people access to smart home devices based on a schedule: “This person will have access to the selected devices during the following schedule. Check and edit carefully before inviting. ” This would be similar to the user roles and access levels offered by the Nest app, which would be great for preventing kids or roommates from controlling devices in your bedroom, office, or bedroom.

<string name=”user_roles_access_summary_fragment_title”>Access summary</string>
 
<string name=”user_roles_access_summary_fragment_description”>This person will have access to the selected devices during the following schedule. Carefully review and edit before inviting</string>

For now, we can only see that everyone has full access to everything in the Home app, so we’ll have to be patient until Google releases the new detailed options to the public. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait until Google I / O 2021 for this to happen.

You can download the most recent version of the Google Home app from the Play Store or APK Mirror.

Google home
Google home