Unreleased Nest Hub redesign surprisingly pops up at Google Store

Abner Li | Feb 9 2023 - 10:39 am PT

Last March, Google appeared to accidentally roll out a rather significant redesign of the Nest Hub UI. It was quickly pulled, but the visual revamp has since made a surprising, offline reappearance.

This redesign introduced a quick settings shade when swiping down from the top of the screen that’s similar to the Home Hub-era “Home View” panel. Today, that gesture just takes you to the Home control tab.

The fullscreen starts by noting the day and date in the top-left, while the time is on the other end. You then get a strip of controls for brightness, volume, disabling Sleep Sensing (on the 2nd-gen Nest Hub), do not disturb, alarm shortcut, and settings.

Below that is the room you Nest Hub is in with any relevant smart home appliances, like lights, shown alongside device categories (Cameras, Speakers & TVs, Routines, etc).

Meanwhile, swiping up from the bottom of the screen immediately opens the “app” launcher. At the moment, you get an intermediary bar that has six recents and “Show all” to see the full shortcuts grid. In all, this is very similar to the general layout of Pixel phones.

After the brief appearance in March of 2022, we’ve not seen any signs of this redesign. Google I/O, the Google Home app redesign announcement, and the fall hardware event passed without any news of the Nest Hub redesign.

Its reappearance, surprisingly, is in an advert for “Nest Hub + Philips Hue smart lights” at the Google Store in Williamsburg. We see the light theme version of these Nest Hub quick settings. In the top-left corner of the screen, you vaguely see “Mon, Mar 28.” That would mean 2022, or the day before the redesign actually started appearing.

Credit: Abraham Cabrera

This suggests that the Nest Hub redesign is at a stage where Google saw fit to make advertising mockups. It remains to be seen whether it ever launches at this point. One possible scenario is that Google revamps Cast/Fuchsia-based Nest Hubs alongside the upcoming Pixel Tablet launch or soon after.