For years, one of the most annoying little seams in Google’s smart-home world has been the thermostat split: new Nest models lived comfortably inside the Google Home app, while older — but still perfectly fine — Nest thermostats required you to keep the separate Nest app around if you wanted to set up or edit temperature schedules. That changed this month. Google has quietly started rolling out full temperature scheduling for the 3rd-generation Nest Learning Thermostat and the Nest Thermostat E into the Google Home app for users in the US and the UK.
If you’re the kind of person who likes different temperatures for morning, work hours and bedtime, scheduling is the whole point of a smart thermostat. Newer Nest models already let you do that inside Google Home, but older models — the ones many people bought five or more years ago — were shipped with the Nest app as the main control surface. That meant juggling two apps: Home for automations, voice control and device groups, and Nest for the actual schedule. For anyone who doesn’t like app clutter, that was a low-level irritation that hung around a long time.
Google says the feature “began rolling out starting last week,” so depending on your phone and account, the option may already be in the Home app or it may show up in the next few days. When the switch happens, existing schedules you created in the Nest app will be transferred to Google Home — including schedules that use sensors and fan controls. In short, moving to Home should not mean rebuilding your routine.
This move follows a broader, sometimes awkward consolidation effort by Google. In April, the company said it would stop shipping software updates for the very oldest Nest Learning Thermostats — the first and second generations — effectively nudging users toward newer hardware or relying on manual controls. At the same time, Google promised to expand Home’s features for newer-but-not-newest devices, an olive branch for people who didn’t want to upgrade their thermostat but did want fewer apps.
The scheduling update isn’t the only polish. Google also rolled out visual updates in the Home app for Nest thermostats: brighter, more distinctive colors and clearer textual descriptions that make it easier to see whether a device is heating, cooling, or idle. The energy dashboard has been refreshed too, now showing more detail and a weekly year-over-year comparison so you can spot trends in how your heating and cooling are being used. For households trying to shave a few kilowatt-hours off the monthly bill, that historical view can be handy.
Like many big app consolidations, the rollout hasn’t been perfectly smooth. A handful of users and some outlets have reported hiccups — anything from schedule items not appearing immediately to minor UI oddities — so if you don’t see your schedule migrated the second it arrives, don’t panic. In many cases the migration has worked as promised; in others, Google’s support threads show engineers and users comparing notes.
What to do next
- Update Google Home to the latest version from the Play Store or App Store.
- Open Home, tap your thermostat, and look for Schedules in the device view — that’s where the migrated schedule should appear. Google’s help pages explain the exact path if you need step-by-step guidance.
- If schedules aren’t visible, check the Nest app to confirm you had a schedule saved there (those entries should be migrated), and consult the Google Nest Community or support pages for status updates.
Even with scheduling in Home, there are edge cases: certain diagnostics and historical energy graphs can be more detailed in the legacy Nest ecosystem, and power-user workflows sometimes live in obscure corners of older apps. But for the majority of users — those who want to set a weekly heating rhythm and forget about it — being able to do everything from the Google Home app simplifies life and reduces the number of places you have to look when something goes wrong.
This is a tidy example of product consolidation: a company with two overlapping apps decides to fold capabilities into one, and users mostly win because they do less app management. It’s also a reminder that hardware bought in the 2010s isn’t guaranteed decades of seamless support; Google’s April decision to stop updating the very oldest Nest units was a prompt for users to check how long the devices they rely on will be maintained. For households with the 3rd-gen Learning Thermostat or the Thermostat E, though, this update extends the useful life of those devices by moving core functionality into the modern Home experience.
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