How to Create a Good Mood With the Google Home App
Slowly but surely, Google turned the Google Home app into a centralized control center. If you haven’t opened the app recently, you may not have noticed the many new features and settings available . The most recent of these new features is the ability to change the colors of your smart home lights natively in the Google Home app – which clearly wasn’t, despite in-app dimming settings and other smart lighting features.
Technically, changing the color of smart lights was previously possible with third-party apps from Philips, LIFX and others, but you had to use the appropriate app for every brand of fixtures you installed, or, in some cases, Google Assistant voice commands. … However, the new Google Home lighting control tweak removes the need for these third-party apps. Google Home Users can now change the color of each bulb connected to Google Home in their home in much the same way that an app allows users to control the brightness of their smart bulbs. Here’s how to access the new color lighting settings in the Google Home app.
How to change the bulbs in the Smart Home in the Google Home app
- Update the Google Home app if necessary. The easiest way to check this is to open the app page in the Google Play store and see if an update is pending. You need to use version 2.9 of the application.
- Open the Google Home app and select the room or individual light you want to color change (follow Google’s installation guide if you haven’t connected compatible smart devices / lights).
- Tap the Color option in the Backlight menu, then select the specific color you want to switch to.
There are several restrictions on the new color changing options in the Google Home app. Unlike, say, the full RGB lighting control you get with Philips and LIFX apps, the Google Home app only offers preset colors. This seems like an odd decision, especially since full RGB control is available elsewhere. Likewise, while the app tells you if a particular light is on or off and its brightness level, it does not display the current color of an individual bulb, which means you might have to play a guessing game if you are controlling a lot of bulbs. In all fairness, the collection of 42 available colors offers a respectable variety of hues to switch between, and you can avoid having to guess which bulb you’re changing by giving them clear and specific labels, but these are odd limitations nonetheless.
These quirks aside, the color swap feature will be a welcome addition for Google Home users who prefer to control as many smart home devices as possible from a single app.
Once you’ve set up your mood lighting, it might be worth checking out the many other things your app and Google Home devices can do, such as setting smart home devices to turn off automatically at night .