Google Home will soon allow you to restrict access to smarthome controls

Google Home has only allowed a rudimentary all-or-nothing approach when it comes to managing family members. You can grant someone full access to your smart home devices or none at all. Based on recent UI tweaks, Google wants to change that and may introduce different levels of access soon.

When you go to Google Home Settings -> Household, you will get a list of all the people in your house, along with the usual option to invite another person. What’s new is what you see when you tap on any person in the list, including yourself. The new page shows what level of access someone has and which devices they can control: Access to details and Appliances. At this point, it is still an all-or-nothing approach. Tap on it Access to details item only shows you a new page explaining that ‘everyone in this house can see all activities and access all devices and settings’, so everyone has the role of a Manager. The same goes for the Appliances menu, although it additionally lists every single smart home device in your house.

Implementing these tweaks just for the sake of change wouldn’t make a lot of sense, and the way the interface is structured is just intuitive to assume more detailed options are coming. Sure enough, 9to5Google already saw a few strings that pointed exactly to that in September. The code suggests that you have the option to allow people to access smart home devices based on a schedule: “This person can access the selected devices during the next schedule. Review and edit carefully before inviting.” That would be similar to the user roles and access levels provided by the Nest app, which is great for keeping kids or roommates from controlling devices in your room, office or bedroom.

<string name=”user_roles_access_summary_fragment_title”>Access summarystring>

<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 invitingstring>

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

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