A few weeks ago, I attempted to turn on my living room lamps with the Google Home app on myiPhone 16 Pro. The lamps are plugged into relatively recently releasedWemo smart plugsthat can sometimes be a little delayed, but to my surprise, they didn’t respond at all, even through my Nest Audio and voice commands.
The next day, the smart plugs still didn’t flip on, so I tried to remove and re-add them to the Google Home app, only to uncover thisReddit thread with hundreds of postsabout the same problem. If you’re familiar with the world of smart home devices, outages like this aren’t that uncommon, so I assumed the issue would get fixed at some point. But after briefly reconnecting to my various Wemo smart plugs, they once again dropped from the Home app and Google Assistant voice commands a few hours later.
Making the situation worse, Belkin, Wemo’s parent company, then announced that it’sdropping support for the smart plug brandon January 31th, 2026. It’s not clear why, but it appears maintaining the connection to Google’s Home app and Alexa just isn’t worth it for the accessory maker (the smart plugs will reportedly still work with Apple’s HomeKit). Hopefully, this isn’t the start of a new trend with third-party smart home devices.
Google Home
The Home app is a digital hub for controlling all your Google Home-compatible smart gadgets, with options to build and manage automations, and to pin devices to the main page.
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It’s not great when your smart lights won’t turn on
It’s not just Wemo either. Nearly all of my smart home accessories, ranging from the severalPhilips Hue smart lightsI have throughout my home (which are usually pretty reliable), to iRobot’s robot vacuums and several smart thermometers, have all recently dropped their connections from the Google Home app and Google Assistant; and I’m not alone with these issues.
The wave of complaints onRedditrelated to rampant Google Home app disconnections caught the attention ofAnish Kattukaran, Google’s Director of Product Management, Google Home and Nest, who stated that the tech giant is working on a fix in arecent post on X.
Smart home products aren’t usually the kind of gadget you want to wait to get magically fixed with a server-side update, as you kind of need to be able to turn your lights on and off. In fact, the issue has gotten so bad that I’ve considered abandoning Google’s Home ecosystem and likely the majority of my smart home devices altogether. The convenience of quick voice commands just doesn’t seem worth it when they don’t work consistently.
This is especially disappointing because Google’s Home ecosystem once felt like the most reliable smart home platform out there. To be fair, they all sort of suck, including Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem, but Google’s Home platform seemed like the easiest to use and the most reliable. Part of me isn’t surprised given the slow,painful demise of Google Assistantover the past few years as Gemini, Google’s fancy AI chatbot, pulls the majority of the tech giant’s resources.
Hopefully, Gemini makes its way to Google’s Nest and Home smart speaker in the coming months, and these frustrating issues become a distant memory. Or, maybe Apple’s next-gen Siri will show up to save the smart home day.
Some people have found success in navigating to the Google Home app’sSettingsand selectingWorks with Google. You can then re-sync or re-add each third-party device. Unfortunately, in the case of Wemo and some of my other smart lights, this solution hasn’t worked for me. That said, I’ve had my Wemo smart plugs randomly reconnect to the Home app a couple of times over the past few days.
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