Google Home 'Call Home' option quietly removed from app, users say

Users are finding themselves unable to reach their Google Home devices from the mobile app after a recent update stripped away a feature that many families relied on daily. The “Call Home” option, which once sat prominently above the Broadcast button in the Google Home app, has vanished without any official announcement from Google.​

Parents who used the feature to check in with their kids at home are particularly frustrated by the change. One Reddit user shared their confusion after discovering the missing option, explaining how they’d regularly use it to call the children while out shopping. When they contacted Google support about the issue, the representative had no answers and simply asked them to submit feedback for another team to review.​

The feature originally launched back in 2019, giving users a convenient way to place calls to their Google Home speakers and displays directly from the app. Fast forward to now, and that convenience has disappeared for countless users who depended on it as a makeshift intercom system or home phone replacement.​

A couple of threads on the Google Home subreddit suggest that the feature was removed recently. One parent described using their Google Home Hub as the primary way to communicate with children who don’t have cell phones, combining it with broadcasts and voice calling for a complete home communication setup.

After the recent app update made Gemini mandatory, the calling option simply stopped appearing. They noted that while their kids can still call out from the device, incoming calls to the hub are no longer possible through the Home app.​

Google’s support team appears to be categorizing reports as a “bug,” though users suspect this is an intentional product decision that wasn’t properly communicated to support staff, which might just be the case. Some affected users have managed to find a workaround by linking Google Meet in the app settings and calling device email addresses directly, but this requires setting up dedicated Google accounts for each device. It’s a clunky solution compared to the straightforward “Call Home” button that existed before.​

There’s even a post about it on Google’s Nest community, but it’s fresh and thus no one else has commented at the time of this writing. So we’ll have to wait for an official word from Google to understand what exactly is going on.

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