Google Home Speakers downloading massive amounts of data

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The new Google Home Speaker has an issue where it downloads hundreds of gigabytes of data in the background for some owners.

Over the past week, several reports have emerged about how the Google Home Speaker appears to be continuously downloading data from company servers.

In my case, a Google Home Speaker that has not been used in the past day for voice commands or media streaming consumed 17 GB of data in 24 hours. At 3 a.m. PT, it downloaded 9.99 GB. Given the timing, this could be related to failed attempts to download device firmware.

Meanwhile, on October 13, the same speaker downloaded 41 GB of data. Over the past 30 days, the total download comes in at 132 GB.

It’s not clear if this is a widespread issue. Another lightly used Home Speaker of ours (in a different household) downloaded only 2 GB of data in the past month.

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That doesn't make sense how much storage does it have? It's just downloading and deleting constantly?

Most routers let you check how much data a particular device has used. If you’re using Nest Wifi, go to the Google Home app’s Wifi top tab > Devices > select your speaker > Device usage graphs. You can switch between 1-, 7-, and 30-day graphs.

We’re not seeing this download issue with other Google Home and Nest devices, including several Nest Hubs in the same house as the affected Home Speaker.

If you have multiple Home Speakers and a limited data plan, this issue could easily breach your cap, as some have found.

In a statement to 9to5Google today, the company acknowledged the issue and said “a fix is already rolling out that should address this for users.”

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Abner Li

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Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com