Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen): Assistant Removal Begins on 4 September 2026

Three days after this was published, Google starts taking Google Assistant away. The Nest Hub still shows 99.99 dollars on Google's store and has been out of stock since August.

On 4 September 2026 Google begins removing access to Google Assistant, a process it says may take a few weeks to reach everyone, and once it has gone from a device you will not be able to switch back. Google Home and Google TV hardware keeps Assistant for now, so a Nest Hub (2nd gen) will not fall silent on Friday. But the assistant that defines this screen is on a published schedule for replacement, the replacement has a documented record of being slower at the job, and Google has not announced anything to replace the hardware either.

Where the Nest line stands on 1 September 2026

• Nest Hub (2nd gen): 99.99 dollars on Google’s store, the same price as at its March 2021 launch
• 21 August 2026: Android Authority found the Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max and Pixel Tablet all out of stock at once
• 17 June 2026: Google ended production of the Nest Mini (2nd gen) and the Nest Audio
• 25 June 2026: the Gemini-powered Google Home Speaker went on sale at 99.99 dollars
• No successor to any Google smart display has been announced

What happens on Friday, and what does not

Tom’s Guide sets out the mechanics of the migration. From 4 September 2026 Google starts pulling Assistant from Android phones, tablets, Wear OS watches and paired devices, warning that the rollout may take a few weeks and that once it has happened there is no route back to Assistant. Google TV and Google Home devices, which includes this display, keep Assistant for the moment.

For now is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Gemini for Home has been rolling out since 1 October 2025, alongside the subscription that replaced Nest Aware, and the direction of travel is not ambiguous. A buyer spending 99.99 dollars this week is buying a five-year-old screen whose voice layer is scheduled to be swapped for something with a poor early record.

A buy button on an empty shelf

Google’s store page for the Nest Hub (2nd gen) shows 99.99 dollars, or four payments of 25 dollars, with a working Buy button and no discontinuation or stock messaging as of 1 September 2026. That is the same price it launched at in March 2021, which means Google has not repriced this product once in five years.

Android Authority reported on 21 August 2026 that the Nest Hub (2nd gen), the Nest Hub Max and the Pixel Tablet were all completely out of stock on the Google Store at the same time, with only an email notification option, and that Google had not responded to its inquiry. Treat the Buy button as stale. Google’s head of Home, Anish Kattukaran, has said the company is definitely still committed to smart displays and will have news to share soon, without naming a device, a price or a date. The only other evidence of a successor is a Google Home Display string spotted in the iOS Home app code on 13 May 2026 by the developer aaronp613. Code strings are not products.

The speakers Google killed in June, and the one that replaced them

On 17 June 2026 Google confirmed it had ended production of the Google Nest Mini and the Google Nest Audio, saying it was refining its portfolio of Google Home and Nest devices and that existing units would continue to be fully supported with regular software updates, security patches and customer care. The replacement arrived a week later: the Gemini-powered Google Home Speaker went on sale on 25 June 2026 at 99.99 dollars, Google’s first new smart speaker in six years.

That is what a supported transition looks like when Google has a successor ready. Displays got no such announcement. A speaker line was retired and immediately replaced; the display line was quietly emptied from the shelves and left there.

Seven seconds to turn on a light

TechRadar’s Rowan Davies reported on 9 April 2026 that Gemini for Home users were seeing delays of seven to ten seconds on commands as simple as switching a light on, with routines in the worst cases taking around five minutes to fire. One quoted user said it was so slow to trigger home commands that it was almost worthless. Google’s own remediation claim, a 40 percent reduction in smart home latency, is an admission of how large the regression was, and it shipped alongside an expansion into 16 more countries and seven more languages.

Android Police published a first-hand account of what else broke after the switch. The author treats these as systematic gaps rather than isolated bugs and advises rebuilding automations from scratch instead of expecting them to carry over.

• Music, internet radio and podcast playback from streaming services became unreliable
• Typed commands stopped working properly
• Missing device errors appeared for hardware that was present
• Location-based routine triggers for arriving home and leaving stopped working
• Multi-device routines involving smart plugs and lights failed
• The Sonos One lost assistant support entirely

Nest Aware is now Google Home Premium, and Gemini Live sits inside it

Nest Aware was discontinued and rebranded as Google Home Premium on 1 October 2025. Standard costs 10 dollars a month or 100 dollars a year and covers 30 days of event video history, familiar-face and package alerts, sound detection for glass breaking and smoke alarms, and Gemini Live on speakers and displays. It is included with Google AI Pro at 19.99 dollars a month. Advanced costs 20 dollars a month or 200 dollars a year, adding 60 days of event history plus ten days of 24/7 recording, conversational Gemini search across video history, automated event descriptions and Home Brief daily summaries. It is a 10 dollar add-on for AI Pro subscribers and included with Google AI Ultra at 249.99 dollars a month.

Note where Gemini Live landed. The conversational assistant Google is replacing Assistant with is, on speakers and displays, a paid feature of Home Premium rather than a free capability of hardware you already own. What the free tier retains after the rebrand is not spelled out in the coverage we could verify, which is itself an unsatisfying answer for anyone deciding whether to buy in.

Things this screen used to do

A five-year-old device accumulates a record, and this one’s record is of capability going away rather than arriving.

• June 2023: third-party Google Assistant voice apps, known as Conversational Actions, and the Games tab were removed from Nest Hub devices, taking third-party Notes and Lists integrations with them, including Any.do, AnyList, Bring and OurGroceries. The deprecation was announced in June 2022 with user warnings from April 2023.
• September 2023: the Nest Hub Max lost Zoom support on 30 September and the ability to join Google Meet meetings by code or link on 28 September, both by remote software change.
• 2026: Google Assistant itself begins to be withdrawn across the wider ecosystem.
• Sleep Sensing on the 2nd gen Hub is still a free preview with no announced end date. Google’s help page says only that it is excited to explore how this could become part of the Fitbit and Google Health Premium experience in future, which signposts a paywall without dating one.

So is 99.99 dollars a reasonable thing to spend

If you already own one, keep it. It works, Google has committed to supporting existing Nest hardware with updates and security patches, and none of the above bricks anything this week.

If you are buying, the case is thin. You would be paying the 2021 launch price for a product Google’s own store cannot reliably ship, with no successor announced, an assistant transition underway, and the conversational features that justify the transition sitting behind a 10 dollar monthly subscription. A reader who wants a Google voice device with a future should look at the Google Home Speaker at the same 99.99 dollars and accept that it has no screen. A reader who specifically needs a display should wait for whatever Kattukaran was hinting at, because there is no version of this purchase that gets better by being made in September.

Sources: Tom’s Guide · Android Authority · 9to5Google · TechRadar · Android Police