Control your smart gear with HomeKit
Tie everything together – if you’re an Apple user
There is no one smart light, and no one lighting system. That’s good; competition is what makes tech better. But the incompatibility that comes from having lots of options can pose a big problem when it comes to automation. It makes sense from a business standpoint – if you’re Philips, LIFX, or one of any number of other manufacturers, you want people to be locked into buying more lighting from you, rather than your competitors.
But it means that if you’re already baked into Hue, for example, you won’t be able to use your Hue Gateway or your Hue app to group your ceiling lights with, say, the LIFX Tile (see p56) you’ve bought to brighten up your wall. Philips doesn’t offer an equivalent light, and the LIFX app is similarly incompatible with Hue’s more esoteric bulbs. If you want to use both, at least in theory, you’ll have to deal with using both apps.
But not every bit of tech is quite as awkward: the major brands’ compatibility with Apple’s HomeKit means your iOS devices (and, as of macOS Mojave, your Mac) can act as that unifying platform that the individual apps lack. Group your lights with HomeKit and you can switch off everything, including other kinds of HomeKit- compatible gear, at once. You could create a ‘Good Night’ scene that turns off all lights, kills smart plugs connected to your telly, and seals up your smart door locks, all together. Competing ecosystems, nicely unified.
Group your lights with HomeKit and you can switch off everything
It’s not even just a case of toggling the power – things don’t have to be so basic. Line up a HomeKit group or two, and you can tweak the colour and temperature of all of your various lights to hit a mood; use scenes to time everything to come on at once automatically. You simplify and combine all those actions you’ve come to expect from advanced smart gear.