Launch your smart home Action

This page describes the process for launching your smart home Action.

Pre-launch checklist

Before proceeding to submit your Action for release, check that your project satisfies these requirements. Completing this checklist improves your project's chances of approval by helping you catch many of the issues we see during the approval process.

The following step is specific to devices that require safety testing certification:

The following step is specific to devices that use the App Flip feature:

Submit an Action for release

To submit your smart home Action for release, follow these steps.

Go to the Actions on Google console

  1. Select your project.
  2. From the left navigation menu, select Deploy > Release.
  3. From the Production section, click Start submission.
User interface for submitting a smart home Action using the Actions
           console.
Figure 1: Submitting a smart home Action for release using the Actions on Google Console.

Check your submission status

You submission request triggers two phases in the review process: a policy review and a certification review. Your Action is launched to production only when it successfully passes both reviews.

  • Policy review: All Actions undergo a policy review, which verifies that your Action follows the policy guidelines for Actions on Google.
  • Certification review: smart home Actions go through certification review for additional quality assurance validation. Certification reviewers verify the content you provide through the certification request form, including your test suite for smart home results.

To see the detailed review status for your Action, open your smart home project in the console and click Deploy, then Release.

If the review team finds an issue that requires your attention, you will see that status reflected in the console user interface for your project. You will also receive an email from Google describing what needs to be revised. Once you make the necessary changes, you can resubmit your project in the Actions Console.

User interface for checking your smart home Action submission
           status.
Figure 2: Checking the status of your Action release request.

If approved by Google, your Action is queued for launch (usually within a week after approval). Once launched, end-users can discover your Action in the Google Home app (GHA).

Once your smart home Action is released to production, that project will not appear in the agent list in the GHA with a [test] prefix. To perform further development and testing on an Action that you have already published, you should use a separate draft project. You can create as many draft projects as you need to suit your development processes and infrastructure.

By default, your Action is launched globally for all supported languages. To restrict the discovery of your Action to users from specific locales, you can configure the languages supported for your Action (via Overview > Modify languages in Settings from the Actions Console).

Make changes to your published Action

If you are publishing any changes to your project (for example, if you want to use a different fulfillment URL), follow these steps:

  1. Resubmit your test suite results.
  2. Fill out a new certification request form (by clicking Deploy > Smart home certification).
  3. Resubmit your Action for review.

Resubmitting an Action for review, if it has been published, creates a new version of the smart home Action in the Actions Console. You can view the history of all versions of your Action (including those under review or withdrawn) by opening the Releases page.