Google Home starts work on the highly requested Vacation mode (APK teardown)

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority

Google Home’s presence sensing feature makes triggering Routines on your smart home devices incredibly easy. It uses your phone’s location and sensors in Google Home devices to determine whether you’re home or not and automatically activates the Home or Away Household Routines. Google could soon add another Routine to the feature for when you go on a vacation.

An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

Google Home users have been clamoring for a vacation mode for quite a while now, and it seems like Google may have finally listened. We’ve spotted a new Vacation option in the Home and Away menu in version 3.23.1.3 of the app. As you can see in the following screenshots, this option has a calendar icon that will likely let you set the dates for your vacation to trigger the new routine.

The Vacation Routine isn’t quite ready for rollout, as tapping the calendar icon in the current release delivers an error. There’s no Vacation option in the Household Routines section of the Automations tab either, so we can’t say exactly how this feature will work.

However, based on similar features offered in the Samsung SmartThings and Philips Hue apps, we suspect that the upcoming Vacation Routine might randomly turn on your lights, play music through your smart speakers, open/close your blinds, etc. to mimic the appearance of someone being at home. This may help deter malefactors from targeting your home while you’re away.

Since the feature is in an early stage of development, we can’t confirm any details at the moment. We’ll keep an eye on the changes and share more information as soon as it becomes available.

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