Google Home's new controls will keep your roommates from messing with your stuff

Summary

• Google Home offers Member access feature for shared smart home control.
• Users can grant limited access to trusted individuals with two-tier permissions.
• The feature allows customization of access levels for various smart devices.

Most of our favorite smart home gadgets come with their own remote controllers or companion apps to enable automation, scheduling, and other such features. However, juggling between these apps repeatedly is a chore, and that's where Google Home compatibility saves the day. Besides supporting a lot of smart home hardware, the app is now widely testing a feature that extends these conveniences to your loved ones too.

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In its current state, Google Home can serve as your smart hub for multiple devices, but handing the same controls over to family members or anyone you share the living space with, is not easy. In rare cases, setting up the controls in their Home app might be worth the effort, but in November this year, Google started testing a better solution with a limited audience. Named Member access, this feature allowed trusted members limited access to your smart devices (via Android Authority).

Quite like shared access to smart door locks, this feature can be convenient when you want to give unsupervised but limited control of your appliances to a house guest. Depending on the implementation, it can prove indispensable for homeowners who list properties for short-term holiday rentals. Now, this feature is rolling out to even more users through Google's public preview program. Users can grant others access even if invitees aren't in the program.

Convenient setup with detailed settings

Two-tier access

This wider rollout features two levels of permissions you can grant to people who will share smart home controls with you — Member access, and Admin access. The former gives the member basic controls with personalization for Assistant, presence, and other media services while Admin access is comparable to yours, and meant for people you trust more. As the owner, you can customize the level of Member access, like those for activity logs, home-wide actions, specific cameras and locks, or Nest Wi-Fi settings.

Google isn't restricting this test by account type, so you just need to be on the latest version of the Home app to use shared controls, with an email address you'll provide the host for setting up your access. If you're sharing access to your own devices, you'll find detailed settings under Settings → Household & access → Add → Home member.

Since this feature is already in public testing, we suppose a proper stable rollout isn't too far away. We will let you know when that happens.