A post on the Google Home subreddit notes that the changes may be server side and not actually dependent on the latest app version. With that said, since these began rolling out around three days ago, many users should be seeing them by now. The biggest change to the Google Home app is of course the controls for your TV. You should now find touch controls for a handful of the most basic things. This includes buttons for volume adjustment, enabling power, channel up and down, a source button, and pause/play buttons. Basically, everything you need for good TV session. More to the point, the buttons are big. So the controls in general should be very easy to use. Naturally, there is one big prerequisite to using these new touch controls.
Google Home app TV controls need a compatible TV
The newly added full touch controls are definitely a hugely beneficial addition to the app. But, you will need to have a compatible TV to take advantage of them. This simply means you need to have a TV that supports Google Assistant. Which is quite a few modern TVs from big brands these days. This isn’t to be confused with TVs that are using the Google TV/Android TV platform, which have their own set of media controls in the app. All the controls are located on one main screen which helps to simplify the user experience alongside the large buttons. Additionally, tapping the source button manifests the source list from a panel that comes up from the bottom of the screen. So you never really have to bring different screens up at all.
