Autom ate your smart home

Make your abode truly clever with automatic responses to events

Connecting your smart home accessories to the Home app gives you the ability to check the status of sensors and toggle devices on or off at will, but that’s just the foundation of making your home smarter. Things get really clever when you use sensor data, the time of day, or a change in your location to trigger behaviors. For example, you can have a heater turn on when you leave work so your home is warm when you arrive there.

The Home app’s Automation tab is the key to doing this. There you can define conditions that will cause an accessory or scene to turn on or off. Automations can change the status of a single accessory, or they can activate multiple scenes at once. For example, an automation might turn on lights in multiple rooms at sunset, and set the brightness level of each light to a suitable intensity for that time of day and their location, so that you aren’t dazzled if you happen to be home. Or you might set one light to turn on along with your heating when you leave work at the end of the day, but only if the sun has set – indicating that it’s winter.

You can disable automations to ensure they don’t run – say in summer or when you’re away from home – rather than deleting them and having to recreate them at a later date. The Home app marks those that are disabled as such, to help you find and turn them on again.

In the tutorial on page 42 we mentioned that it’s worth downloading whatever apps the manufacturers of your HomeKit accessories provide, so you can receive firmware updates. Automation is another good reason to do so, as these apps may provide features that Home does not.

Apple introduced the Home app in iOS 10. It hasn’t seen major changes in the months since then, so there are some aspects that are less than great. If you set up many automations, for instance, they become a little tedious to browse and manage – but we’ve got some pointers to help you with that.