Reflections on a Year with HomeKit

I&#x27;m probably alone in thinking home automation is a tremendous waste of time. I think there&#x27;s maybe one exception, and that&#x27;s being able to switch on heating remotely, which is actually useful. The rest is IMO gratuitous nerdery. Mildly interesting&#x2F;fun: maybe. Needed: no.<p>In a world in which resources are scarce and everyone is getting fatter, getting off one&#x27;s ass to switch on a light is probably a good thing...

I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m &quot;doing it wrong&quot; but the lights on my homekit, bought directly from Apple, take 5 to 90 seconds to respond and worse, the Home App (by Apple) often gives zero indication it even noticed I pressed a button in the app.<p>in other words I&#x27;ll press the off button for a room but there is no indication that it understood me and it&#x27;s going to turn off the lights, then if I wait 5 to 90 seconds it may eventually turn them off, or not, try again. If I try again at the wrong time, as in just before it was about to actually turn them off then of course it turns them back on, repeat<p>my guess is apple only tests in some kind of ideal conditions and has no idea their system is so crap in others.

&gt; We don’t rely heavily on HomeKit automations, collections of light and outlet states that trigger based on time or some other variable.<p>Good thing. Even the most basic multi-scene zone automations are challenging to “program” in Homekit.<p>The official Home app lacks an interface to reasonably create and administer:<p>“after 10 pm, if motion is detected by any of these four sensors, set these three lights to 30%. Do not turn them off until all of the motion sensors in this zone register as clear.”<p>This describes lighting a hallway and turning it back off to and from the bathroom.<p>I’m glad this author is comfortable talking to Siri all the time but I’d prefer to just get the automation right and use buttons for overrides. Siri requires a verbal response to homekit requests and they are almost always too loud and loquacious. Soft success or failure tones would be far preferable.<p>I spent a fair amount of time and money trying to make a pure homekit setup work. It did but it’s not scalable or maintainable.<p>It seems like there may be a plan around shortcuts but whatever it is needs to look like programming in Python. Not this set of unsortable, ungroupable table view cells.<p>If you look at homekit forums, you’ll see that the updates to HomePod have been disruptive to homekit, silently breaking automation until all HomePods have been restarted and contained bizarre bugs.<p>I generally like Apple products, but Homekit is the biggest mess of all categories right now. The head of the department left at the two year mark ~ a month ago. It will probably take some time for someone to step in and make serious progress.

I’ve spent the last few years turning my current apartment into a ‘smart’ HomeKit apartment. While there are some rough edges from time to time, there’s a lot to like about it overall. A few learnings from setting it up:<p>- the quality of HomeKit accessories you purchase matters a lot. Cheap unreviewed light switch? It will likely be unreliable and frustrating. It’s worth getting quality products.<p>- bad or unreliable Wi-Fi? Fix this first. Before upgrading to a newer mesh network, accessories were often unresponsive for me.<p>- Siri sucks. Despite this, HomePods are still a core piece of a HomeKit setup, and really make the home feel ‘smart’. Clear articulation and setting up scenes can help prevent Siri mishaps.<p>For me there’s no ‘one great thing’ that makes HomeKit worth it. The marginal benefit of having lights, shades, heating, and more accessible via voice&#x2F;app all adds up.<p>Leaving the house? One button tap turns things off. Busy feeding the baby? Shades go down via voice command. Zoom meeting and the light in your background looks too bright? A few clicks, and it’s set to 50%. No one great thing, but lots of small nice-to-haves.

Recently switched from Alexa to HomePod for our HA stuff and haven’t looked back. Having native support in iOS is just so pleasurable to use. When we have guests, we add their phone to our Home app and they can control things in the house the same way we do. It’s lovely and intuitive.

Figured this might be a decent place to ask, does anyone know why the Home app is so bad but I don’t seem to see complaints about it? It’s by far the least responsive Apple app I’ve seen, it constantly outputs audio on the wrong device (e.g. to speakers even when AirPods are connected), it crashed if I scroll back to past camera videos, and maybe worst-of-all, the Mac app is somehow like a pre-multitasking iPad app. I guess it’s Catalyst, but other Catalyst apps work fine. Why does this one break as soon as it loses window focus?<p>More on topic, I’ve also been trying to ask Siri for stuff at home and toddlers are way smarter.

And for those who like to tinker and want to integrate all devices into homekit: homebridge<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homebridge.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homebridge.io</a>

My HomeKit home only consists of 2 smart plugs by Eve (evehome.com). They operate over Thread which our HomePod Mini enables. We have one for the lamps in the bedroom and one on our espresso machine. Coming downstairs to a warm espresso machine in the morning is great.

Good read as I&#x27;ve heard&#x2F;seen relatively few people fully automate their homes. There definitely are a lot of snags and Alexa&#x2F;Amazon has their own share after watching my dad spend a few hours trying to integrate a stereo in with his many Alexa devices. We have a long way to go for sure.

A neat writup. I am sincerly curious about the speech interface: does it worth having the speech interface, if you have to mind not saying specific expressions at your own home because Siri might get confused? I thought people were more longing for the interface on phones (vs. walk up to a physical switch) and do not really want Siri or alikes.

&gt; we can’t add Tonya’s iCloud account to the “home”<p>I&#x27;ve got the same problem with me and my partner. If any Apple engineer happens to read this this would be on my top 3 list of bugs to fix in the Apple ecosystem. The only workaround I&#x27;m aware of is creating entirely new Apple IDs.

Reminder: The Home app requires iCloud, and most data in iCloud (such as photos and backups) is not end to end encrypted, which allows Apple and the USG to read all of the data at any time without a warrant.<p>It makes these sorts of systems a nonstarter for me, personally.

Man.. the beginning of these tracks sound a lot like the alarm sounds on iOS.. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SCJKdajjYYM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=SCJKdajjYYM</a>

I do think home automation is valuable but it also seems like a band-aid over the unnecessary complexity of some building systems.