Nest's thermostat is one of the leading smart thermostats to date, but two new additions may serve to set it apart from the competition and cement it as the go-to thermostat for your smart home.
These two new additions have arrived as part of an update to Nest's iOS and Android app today, which will allow it to monitor your phone's location as well as allowing a household to set up a family account. Both of these additions are answers to two prominent complaints about the iOS that made it difficult for the Nest Thermostat to function to the peak of its abilities.
The first update is to the thermostat's Auto-Away mode, called Home/Away Assist. The auto-away function was designed to let Nest know when someone has left the house. Once it recognizes that someone left the building, it would automatically change the temperature to a more energy efficient option. The problem is that while auto-away does work, it can also switch to Auto-Away mode while users are asleep and at other times it would work sporadically or not at all.
The second update is made to work in conjunction with Home/Away Assist and is called Family Accounts. Until the update, families had to share a single account if they wanted control over any Nest product, making it hard for Nest to track individuals. The update allows several people to set up their own accounts and have control over the same products.
Family accounts is a nice touch, but it's real value is that it will allow Home/Away Assist to track multiple phones, giving it a better sense of how people come and go.
"This is an input that's going to make it more accurate and efficient," Nest Senior Product Manager Greg Hu said of the location tracking.
Nest notes that this update doesn't just help with its thermostat, it helps every other connected product as well. Since there's a larger ecosystem of products that integrate with Nest, many of which are set to activate once the house is empty, this one update could help automate the entire home.
Of course, this update is hardly groundbreaking, as many other smart home platforms already use location tracking as a home/away mechanism. However, Nest argues that it does it better since the tracking doesn't rely on a single phone. Instead, it claims that by tracking multiple phones and using the data collected by the thermostat collects on its own, it can fulfill more specific settings for any given home.
There's also the question of complexity. Whereas other companies may use a hub so that all smart products within a household can talk with one another, products that integrate with Nest can only really tell the thermostat to turn on or off, or turn on or off themselves depending on the thermostat's status. However, Hu explains that this simplicity is intentional.
"What's really important to us is that what's happening in your home is understandable and intuitive to the customer," he says. "The more cumbersome, the more complicated it gets, the more frustrating to customers."
