Nest camera notifications don’t show video previews for some on Android 11 Beta

Ben Schoon | Jun 10 2020 - 5:04 pm PT

Google’s Nest service is central to many people’s home security, and one perk of the brand’s camera is the ability to get notifications when movement is detected. If you’re on Android 11’s first beta release, though, beware — Nest notifications don’t show video previews.

When a Nest camera is turned on and detects motion, it sends a notification to your various devices to tell you it detected motion or a person. Along with that, Android devices also show a video preview on that notification which shows several seconds of the motion that was detected. It’s pretty handy!

For reasons unclear, though, Android 11’s first beta release breaks this part of Nest notifications.

The issue was first pointed out on Twitter, but we’ve since confirmed it on our own hardware. As you can see in the screenshot below, the notification doesn’t show the video preview or a way to expand the notification to access a preview. Most likely, fixing this is just being a matter of Nest needing to update its app to work with Android 11. Today’s release, after all, is just a beta, so bugs like this are to be expected. Hopefully, things will be patched up before the final release.

Notably, though, this may not affect all users. I had one tip land in my inbox saying notifications were working fine while a reader commented below reporting the same. Clearly, your results may vary.