// 9TO5GOOGLE — MOBILE & WEB
Google Home just became a power user’s paradise
Good morning. Today I’m finding some peace playing Lumines Remastered, deciding whether to get my kids one of the new 4th-gen Yoto players, and trying to figure out why everyone is freaking out about this recent Tom Cruise interview.
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Over the past few months, I’ve been using MCP (Model Context Protocol) to connect with my bank, my to-do app (TickTick), my personal database (Obsidian), and anything else I can get my hands on. I find it intuitive to have a conversation with a chatbot about stacking tasks, performing a complex set of calculations, or just figuring out the answer to a difficult problem.
Now Google is getting in on the MCP action with Home MCP, a way to connect coding agents like Claude, Codex, Antigravity, Hermes, and OpenClaw to Google’s Home ecosystem and the products connected to it.
Right now, the tool is limited to Google Home Premium Advanced subscribers in the US, but it’s an ambitious first step toward making it easier to interact with what is usually a digital rat’s nest of brands, categories, and compatibility layers. Google has already rolled out Gemini for Home in an attempt to make automation more straightforward, but I commend the company for dipping its toe into the DIY space and seeing what happens.
According to Google, MCP “gives your favorite AI agent real-world physical context—allowing it to analyze and answer questions about home activity, summarize camera footage across rooms, manage devices on your behalf, or even create your own smart home dashboards using everyday language.” I’m totally going to use it to teach my Nest Cam Outdoor that the cat who wanders onto my driveway every morning isn’t, in fact, a person. Wish me luck.
It’s iPhone review season, and because this seems like an “S” year, the camera is rightfully getting the most attention. That’s why I watched basically every second of all the new iPhone 18 Pro reviews from channels like PetaPixel, Tyler Stalman, The Verge, and Matti Haapoja.
I’m still not sure what to think about the aperture control. Most reviews are saying that it has very little real-world utility, while others are claiming that it was the only way to offer an f/1.48 lens without sacrificing depth control (or overly relying on software bokeh). Either way, once Apple decides to offer a hardware feature it tends to stick around whether or not it’s any good (see Camera Control), so we’ll likely see a few more generations of this tech.
Sticking with the iPhone theme, two of my favorite podcasters convened this week to discuss the iPhone Duo and how it fares next to the multitude of Android competitors.