Updates to Private Google Actions

Question

I have a few custom built IoT devices in my house and about a year ago, I developed a Google Dialog Flow and make a Google Action from it. I did this after seeing a youtube of an Alexa Skill demonstration and wanted to do the same on a Google Home. I had things working until it came time to publish my Google Action. Since this was a private application, publishing the action would be a bad idea for my home's security. So I tried the various solutions to keep my action in test mode as describe in many other posts.

Can I develop a private action only accessible via my google home or linked account?

Make google actions development project preview persist longer

Connecting Google Home via webhook to node.js

Creating Actions for Personal use only

And others...

The age of these solutions and the changing of the Google's api have made this a show stopper for me on using the Google Actions.

Another year later, I am looking for updates on this topic and I haven't found anything promising.

At the time of this post, what are people doing to keep their Google Actions in "test mode"?
And does anyone know details of any plans by Google to allow for private Google Actions?

Answer 1

Sooo, another year later: I'm standing at the same cliff as you do / did.

What I experienced and learned about actions on google, is that they killed alpha releases now. So an option (at least in my case) is to deploy a cronjob, that does call gactions test every now and then.

This kind of worked until google decided to actually unlink your account periodically. So my app is up and running and does report the state to homegraph, but my account is unlinked every second or third day. So until I've got an option for periodically link my google account to my testing app, I'm going to look for alternatives.

I'm kind of disappointed in google about this topic.