Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen): no chime/press events via SDM — confirmed Google-side bug, not HA

If your new Nest Doorbell (wired, 3rd gen, 2025) shows up fine in the Nest integration but the Chime event entity never fires, this is a known Google-side bug — nothing to fix in HA. Documenting here to save others the diagnosis.

Symptoms: camera streaming works, motion/person events work, chime event entity is created (event.*_chime) but never updates on a press. Google Home app notifications and speaker announcements work normally, so the press reaches Google’s cloud.

What I verified (HA 2026.7.4, HAOS):

  • Fresh Device Access project topic, validated and Enabled; dedicated subscription; all permission toggles on at nestservices.google.com/partnerconnections; account re-linked; device restarted.
  • Device diagnostics show the sdm.devices.traits.DoorbellChime trait is present — that’s why HA creates the entity.
  • Created an independent pull subscription directly on the Pub/Sub topic: motion/person events from the doorbell publish within seconds (full STARTED/UPDATED/ENDED threads), thermostat trait updates flow constantly, but DoorbellChime.Chime is never published at all — presses produce zero messages while the Home app rings.
  • My previous 2nd-gen doorbell on the identical project published chimes correctly the same day, until the hardware swap.

So the SDM API advertises chime capability for this model but never exports the events. Google’s issue tracker has this open since December 2025: Google Issue Trackerplease star it if you’re affected, star count drives their prioritisation. (Note: some 3rd-gen units in that thread don’t even expose the DoorbellChime trait — two flavours of the same broken rollout.)

Also filed on HA core for visibility: HA github

Update: Starting from scratch and creating a new project in the Google Device Access Console fixed the issue. I can now see my Nest chimes being pub/sub and in Home Assistant.