Google Home can’t catch a break, as Routines widget vanishes

If you’re interested in putting together a particularly impressive smart home setup, Google Home’s Routines are probably your best friend. While getting them configured can take a minute, especially if they involve dozens of devices (like all your lights), once established Routines make it a snap to trigger complex actions with just a single command.

So far, Google has offered Home users a handy shortcut for controlling all those Routines in the form of a desktop widget. While it doesn’t let you activate Routines directly from your home screen, it does offer a quick way to jump that list.

While it could certainly be more full-featured, that was still a nice option to have, which is why we’re a little concerned to see Google take it away. While looking through the latest beta release of the Google app for Android, we noticed that where the app used to offer four widgets and one shortcut, that count has now dropped to three — and it’s the Routines widget that doesn’t make the cut.

Honestly, losing this isn’t going to be the end of the world, but more than anything, maybe we’re just disappointed about how this removal looks in the context of the ongoing frustrations surrounding Google Home. It really doesn’t feel like it would have been that much more effort to give us a new-and-improved Routines widget with direct access to our most-used ones, but rather than be bothered to do that, Google just seems to be abandoning the whole thing.

It’s possible that that Google really does have a new version of this tool waiting in the wings — but then why not coordinate its debut to coincide with retiring the old look? We’re also holding out hope that this is just some kind of beta oversight that may not show up in the final, public release of this build. Because when we look at this change right now, it really just feels like Home and its associated features are not a big priority.