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Old products in Google Home? Here’s how to purge the app and delete inactive devices

If you’ve been using Google Home for quite a while, there’s a chance that you’ve added and since thrown away a couple of compatible products such as old speakers. This guide will take you through an easy way to rid Google Home of those old devices to clean up the list.

The Google Home namesake has been around since 2016, back when the Google Home speaker was alive and well. Through the app, users could control and configure their Assistant-enabled devices, whether that was to have them play music or tell you a joke.

We’ve come a long way since then.

Now, thousands – if not, hundreds of thousands – of speakers, TVs, locks, doorbells, and more have found themselves calling the app “home” for reasons besides the given name. On top of that, the introduction of the Matter standard has funneled in even more devices that were previously only available for other ecosystems like Apple Homekit or Samsung SmartThings.

When that sudden explosion of compatible devices is paired with seven years of Google Home, the odds are high that you might have one or two inactive products taking up space in your Google Home app.

How to delete old devices from Home

Most devices – other than Google’s own – are operated under their own company’s mobile app. To make controlling them a little more convenient, they’re often brought into Google Home after the fact.

Because of this, deleting products from Google Home is only the first step if you want to factory reset a device. If you’re looking to purge the Home app of devices still in your possession but not in use, you can use the following method depending on which version of Google Home you’re running. Keep in mind that the old design is soon to be completely phased out, at the time of this writing.

  1. In the Google Home app, tap the Devices section to find your connected products if you don’t see them right away.
  2. Tap the settings cog.
  3. Hit Remove device towards the bottom of that page.
  4. Follow the steps Google Home takes you through.

Once you finish that process, that device should no longer be connected to your Home app.

Don’t see the “Remove device” prompt?

If there is no Remove device prompt available, you’ll likely see an Unlink option, which generally means that the third-party service responsible can act as its own ecosystem. If you see that option, check to make sure you don’t have multiple items connected from the same third-party app.

If you have multiple devices connected from that manufacturer and only want to disconnect a single product, you’ll need to first delete the product through that manufacturer’s app and refresh its connection to Google Home.

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