Nest Hub bug pauses all media in home when viewing camera feed [Update: Fixed]

Owners of the original Nest Hub have spotted a bug that pauses all media playing in their home while a Nest Camera feed is playing.

Google’s Nest Hub smart display is intended to serve as the center of your smart home, with controls for every device connected to Google Home. Being a smart display, you have the ability to view any Nest Camera feeds right on the Nest Hub, or get a live video alert when someone rings your Nest Doorbell.

However, something seems to have gone awry with this system in recent updates to the Nest Hub. As repeatedly reported on the Google Support Community — and experienced by members of our team — opening any Nest camera feed on the first-gen Nest Hub causes all media on Chromecast-compatible devices in your home to be paused. This includes music playing on smart speakers, videos playing on Android TV, and more.

Worse, once the Nest Hub has paused everything, any attempts to unpause are immediately met with another pause. The only way to get everything playing again is to close the Nest Camera feed on the Nest Hub itself, which immediately releases the pause.

Initially, the bug was only reported by those who enrolled their Nest Hub into the Preview program. This suggests that the issue may be tied to the recent update that switched the first-gen Nest Hub from Cast OS to Google’s new operating system, Fuchsia. With Fuchsia now rolling out more widely to owners of the Nest Hub, this problem will likely become more prominent in the next few days.

Interestingly, the bug only appears to affect Nest-branded cameras, with third-party options like Arlo working as normal on Nest Hub. Nor has the issue been reported on other smart displays like the 2021 Nest Hub or the Nest Hub Max, neither of which have gotten a Fuchsia update.

Google has told us that they are aware of the Nest Hub pausing issue and will be rolling out a fix in the coming weeks.

Update 11/8: A few months after being discovered and later confirmed by Google, the Nest Hub pausing bug has been fixed, making the Nest Hub useful once more for viewing your camera feeds without disrupting every other device in your home. The fix should be widely rolled out by now, but if you’ve perhaps unplugged your Nest Hub while waiting for the issue to be resolved, you’ll likely need to plug it in and wait a day or so for the update to be installed.

Considering the multitude of things that could go wrong by entirely swapping out the underlying operating system of a device in people’s homes, the Nest Hub’s pausing bug seems relatively mild, given that it can be worked around in the short term by viewing camera feeds elsewhere. The only other reported issue of the Fuchsia rollout involved a color-blindness toggle that turned the screen purple.

Thanks, Ted!