Nest gains Android Wear support and new features for better home automation

Nest’s wide variety of products already do a pretty good job at automating your home, and today they’re getting even better. New to the Nest feature set are Family Accounts and Home/Away Assist, which will help make the Nest products in your home easier to control and automate.

The first big feature in today’s update is the addition of Family Accounts. Now up to 10 members in your family will be able to control the Nest products in your home with their personal Nest Accounts. This means you’ll no longer have to share login information with your family members, which is a change we’re sure many Nest users will appreciate.

Next up is a new feature that will help your Nest products know whether you’re at home or away. Here’s the deal – lots of other home automation products on the market use your phone’s location to help decide whether you’re home or not. The problem is, this can lead to mistakes. Your phone’s location might not always be accurate, so some products will, say, unlock your front door when you’re away. This is obviously a problem, and Nest’s solution, called Home/Away Assist, aims to fix that. In addition to using your phone’s location for better accuracy, Nest products will use learning algorithms and activity sensors to help figure out if you’re at home or out and about. What’s more, Home/Away Assist will also use Family Account data and will only switch to Away if everyone is out of the house. Nest says even though its using your phone’s location data, Nest products don’t track where you go… it just needs to know if you’re home or not.

In a real world situation, Nest Cam will turn on when you leave and off when you come back inside, your Nest thermostat will turn the heat on when you get home and down when you go out, and your Nest Protect can run its monthly sound check when you’re away.

If you thought those changes were awesome, it doesn’t stop there. While it wasn’t revealed in the official announcement post, the Nest app’s Play Store description revealed that you can now control your Nest Thermostat with your Android Wear device! This is a feature that should have been added a very long time ago, but we’re happy it’s there now.

If you’re interested, check out the Nest blog post below for more info, or head to the Play Store to update your Nest app.