Smart homes are the future of living and we’ve seen adoption increases quite a lot over the past few years. Major brands have been getting into the space, and Google is there too, with the first and second-generation Nest Hub devices, and the Nest Hub Max. They serve as a great “hub” to control your entire smart home.
If you own a Nest Hub device, you’ll be pleased to know that there’s a new update rolling out to them, namely Fuchsia 16. It comes with a lot of changes and improvements for these models, many of which you’ll be able to notice in your use.
The Fuchsia 16 Update Comes With A Bunch Of Fixes
The last major update for Nest Hub devices was Fuchsia 14, so Fuchsia 16 comes with twice as many fixes since it includes version 15 as well. The update should have rolled out to Nest Hub devices in all regions by now, so you can take advantage of the numerous fixes it brings.
There’s a lot of focus on improving bugs in the Bluetooth functionality, so let’s talk about the improvements in that department first, and then others.
A Whole Lot Of Connectivity and Bluetooth Improvements
If you connect your Nest Hub to your phone or to Bluetooth speakers or headphones, you’re bound to enjoy some of the fixes that come with Fuchsia 16. Here they are:
- A volume control problem when the Nest Hub is being used as a speaker has been fixed.
- An issue with certain headphones not showing up when scanning for Bluetooth devices has been fixed.
- An issue with some speakers being able to connect to the audio channel has been fixed.
- When connected to certain phones, the Nest Hub wouldn’t show media info, but that has been fixed.
- A bug preventing audio from being sent to Bluetooth headphones when on Google Meet calls has been fixed
You might have heard of Matter, which Google is aiming to make the universal standard of smart home devices. It’s a good proposition because it would make it easier for us consumers to get compatible smart home products without worrying too much about proprietary standards. Matter saw a few updates too, such as support for air quality sensors, “subscribing to all device fabrics” (I have no idea what that means), and the Matter update group.
Other Improvements
Besides the Bluetooth and Matter upgrades to the Nest Hub operating system, there are also tons of updates focused specifically on developers making applications or smart devices that connect to the Nest Hub or Nest Hub Max. They’re rather technical, but if you’re interested, you can read more in the release notes for Fuchsia 16.
What Happened To Cast OS?
If you’ve had the first-generation Nest Hub, you might remember that it ran on a Linux-based operating system called Cast OS, but this was finally replaced with Fuchsia OS in 2021. What’s exciting about Fuchsia is that it is based on a custom kernel and not Linux.
Like I always say, Google takes the software side of things very seriously, so moving to Fuchsia was definitely a move made with a lot of consideration in place.
