If your first-generation wired Nest doorbell, better known as the Nest Hello, no longer shows live video in the Google Home app, you are not alone. Owners have been reporting the fault for weeks, and complaints have piled up over the past few days. Google has not confirmed a problem or promised a fix.
Google now calls the device the Nest Doorbell (wired, 1st gen). The symptom is the same across the reports: tapping the camera tile in the Home app never brings up the live view. Some owners say the trouble began after they moved the doorbell from the old Nest app to Google Home.
The earliest complaints sit in a Reddit thread from a user whose older Nest devices had been without live view for more than a week, and in Google’s own help forum, where one owner wrote that the doorbell has no live feed. In all, nearly a dozen support threads describe the same fault. A few people also mention first-generation Nest cameras that stream badly, but far fewer.
One detail points away from a dead doorbell: doorbell notifications still appear on Nest Hub displays for affected people, so the hardware is still talking to Google. Some owners suspect Google’s switch to WebRTC, a streaming technology, but the workarounds built on that theory do not work reliably, and it remains a guess.
Google pushed a software update to its older Nest devices in late October, which is the obvious suspect, though nobody has tied the two together. Beyond generic troubleshooting messages, Google has said nothing about a cause, and the number of reports makes a fault on its side look likely.
