9to5Google Weekender: Is Google’s Nest Cam ready to be a real security camera?

Ben Schoon | Apr 2 2023 - 9:00 am PT

After years of waiting, Google and ADT finally unveiled this week a new do-it-yourself security system called “ADT Self Start.” The new system combines security gear and monitoring from ADT with Google’s Nest ecosystem of products.

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It’s been a long time coming, and seems quite compelling, but there’s one big question I still have.

As someone who’s been using several Nest cameras over the past couple of years, I’m not sure how I feel about them being treated as “real” security cameras. Nest Cams are great for ease of setup and use, monitoring around your home, and their integration with other Google products, but there are some glaring holes that make me pause when thinking of them for security. In the Home app, it’s all too frequent that I can’t load up a recent clip, or that history just doesn’t work for some reason that can’t be explained. These reliability issues have been ongoing for ages, and even following the launch of the much-improved Nest Cam experience in the new Home app, it’s still not exactly reliable.

Google and ADT launch new ‘DIY’ security system with sensors, keypad, Nest integration

Plus, two years later I still can’t manually select footage to download, which is insane from a security perspective. As it stands today, Google Home only allows the download of Nest Cam footage from clips when it detects an event. If the camera decides that something didn’t qualify as an event, including if the subject was just too far away to trigger it, my only option to save that footage is to use a screen recorder.

That’s unacceptable already, but now Google and ADT want to throw that into a proper, paid security system?

I have my doubts, but I’m hoping to be proved wrong. ADT’s security gear looks great, and with everything routing through a single app, there’s a lot of promise. Additionally, the pricing isn’t totally ridiculous – we even confirmed with ADT that everything still works if you don’t opt to pay for professional monitoring. But I am quite worried that the “quirks” of using a Nest Cam will only be multiplied by routing that through another entire app.

Still, at the very least I’m happy I’ll finally be able to upgrade my discontinued Nest Secure with something Google actually seems to care about.

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