Ultimate guide to Apple HomeKit
There’s plenty of potential for Apple’s smart home system, though it lags behind the competition, writes
Apple announced its smart home control system, HomeKit, in 2014 at its annual developers conference. It started enabling it in iOS in mid-2015 and had a more complete rollout later that year. With iOS 10, HomeKit finally got its own app and better integration.
But it remains an immature technology with few choices even for diehard Apple equipment owners. This was emphasized at this year’s CES, a trade show at which Apple never exhibits, but where products from third parties aimed at the ecosystem often get their debut. For HomeKit, it was mostly crickets. Amazon’s Alexa ruled the roost, with a large number of integrations with third parties, extending its voice-controlled system.
This is certainly part of a larger sense of malaise across all smart home systems. While the promise remains immense, multiple competing, incompatible ecosystems that include a lot of products from startup companies seem to have stalled a lot of innovation and even reductions in cost.
Imagine if instead of Wi-Fi, we had three separate high-speed local area wireless networking standards, and had to either set up a separate router for each and use dongles, or buy into an approach that wouldn’t work everywhere when we left the house.
In that context, however, HomeKit still remains behind. While HomeKit is built into iOS and the fourth-generation Apple TV, which can act as a hub of sorts, macOS doesn’t include it. And third parties are making HomeKit-enabled hardware, but not enough and in enough variety that if you’re looking to equip your home with a single system, you have enough choices.
This snapshot of the market will certainly change, but the lack of product announcements at CES means the likelihood is low through much of 2017 for established companies and well-funded newer firms to add significant HomeKit options.
Smart home basics
In case you’re not tuned in to the purpose of smart home devices, controls, and ecosystems, here’s a brief primer and where Apple’s HomeKit fits into things. Smart home devices are a subset of the Internet of Things (IoT): network-connected equipment that can be used over a local network and accessed remotely via the internet. Some smart home gear is also connected to the cloud. Having very little computational intelligence of its own, these devices rely on internet-connected servers for cues or control.
A range of existing home devices can be made smart: thermostats, alarm systems, fridges, washing machines, coffee makers, and much more (see our round-up on page 29). Some of these have been semi-intelligent in the past, with programming options or quirky remote access via smartphone or native apps, or only accessible through low-power, short-range networking when you’re within close proximity. (If you used or use X10 controllers, which date to the 1970s, you may have experienced more primitive versions of this, as X10 relied on home electrical wiring as its primary backbone, even after adding wireless bridges.)
The smart home promise is to bring intelligence to ‘dumb’ gear for reasons of convenience, energy efficiency, safety, and even fun. Lighting is the main example: few people wired-in intelligent lighting controls in homes prior to the development of network-connected light switches and bulbs. Nor would most people consider being able to unlock their front door remotely an important feature, or having remote-controlled blinds. These
would have been largely expensive and custom installations. Smart home products aren’t cheap, but they’re often amenable to user installation and are nowhere as expensive as the previous generation of automated goods.
The goal of a smart home is to take hundreds of small decisions and behaviours and wrap them up so you can trigger them based on time, presence ( judging via sensors or smartphone proximity), or patterns. So you might set what Apple calls a ‘scene’ that you use for your whole family being home in the evening. Another scene might power up a home-entertainment system, dim the lights, lower the blinds, and even roll down a screen or retract a covering.
Unlike some other computer and personal electronics standards for device communication, no single industry group emerged to bring all the disparate manufacturers into one flexible standard, as with Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth, and others. As a result, you can find dozens of protocols that work at various levels of networking function (see below).
Smart home ecosystems are typically built on existing networking standards, providing compatibility at that level at least. This can include the well-known Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but also ones you are unlikely to have heard of if you haven’t already installed gear, such as Thread, ZigBee and Z-Wave.
Why not just use Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-enabled IoT smart home devices, some of which have been around out for years? Because those typically require buying all your equipment from a single company, and relying on it to advance hardware and software on its own. These newer ecosystems may have a single firm dominating them, like Apple or Google, but ultimately hundreds or thousands of companies will make products that work with them, although some companies may have to make multiple versions.
And a coalescing of approaches has started to happen, which will decrease incompatibility and reduce your need to buy in to one system. The recently formed Open Connectivity Foundation comes out of a merger of groups backed separately by chipmaker Qualcomm and CPU giant Intel. As IDG News Service correspondent Stephen Lawson wrote after the 2017 CES, however, it will likely be one to three years before the industry begins to coalesce around a few standards that provide better interoperability.
You may have read some of the coverage in late 2016 about IoT botnets, which are smart devices that have had their software and capabilities hijacked, usually undetected by their owners, and which are then used to launch distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks against targets for financial or political reasons. The IoT devices identified as the biggest problem are typically one-off hardware that aren’t part of any ecosystem, and are typically sold inexpensively by low-end manufacturers.
Hardware that is certified for one of the major smart-home systems, like HomeKit, must demonstrate that it adheres to encryption and other standards. Apple is particularly rigorous on this front, including disabling remote access to HomeKit accessories by default. This may explain why HomeKit hardware has been slower to come to market, too, but it’s a good problem.
HomeKit stands alone, but the Home app stands out
It’s in this framework that Apple remains an island with HomeKit, its own standard that it licenses to
other parties, but which doesn’t interoperate on its own with any other top-level standard, like Thread, a standard deeply supported by Alphabet’s Nest.
HomeKit originally required using various smartphone apps and benefited from a third-party HomeKit hub to pull together connected actions. But Apple added a dedicated app, called Home, starting in iOS 10 and watchOS 2, which radically simplifies controlling HomeKit-equipped hardware. Home controls appear in iOS’s Control Center.
The closest comparison to the Home app for central control in other ecosystems is Google Home, an Amazon Echo-like device that connects to Nest and other supported hardware, and Samsung’s SmartThings, which works with several kinds of smart-home protocols, but not HomeKit. SmartThings has an Android and iOS app, and requires its own hub. Amazon, meanwhile, is making fast progress when it comes to expanding
the universe of smart devices that its Alexa digital assistant can control.
After installing and configuring a HomeKit device via its iOS app, it’s available in Home and can be individually controlled (by tap or with Siri), as well as part of timed, manual, and triggered events. (HomeKit support on iOS devices requires at least iOS 8.1; the Home app comes with iOS 10.)
Manual control works without a hub, but if you want to schedule events, set up user permissions to for specific hardware, and remotely control HomeKit devices, you’ll need one.
Remote control, including using Siri on an iPhone or iPad, requires either a third- or fourthgeneration Apple TV, which must be logged into the same iCloud account. For timed actions and user permissions, you must have a fourthgeneration Apple TV running tvOS 10 or an iPad with iOS 10 on your network. Many people seem to have iPads that routinely stay at home, making this latter option a reasonable choice for them.
In the Home app, all available devices appear and can be assigned to locations, like rooms, and to scenes, which are collections of accessories paired with a state they should switch to, such as the lighting and temperature you’d like to trigger when you wake up and say “good morning” or at a certain time of the day. With a hub, you can share access to HomeKit devices you’ve authenticated to your account, allowing others to use them or modify settings. This can be useful among adults, but also to give a child, babysitter, or house sitter controlled access. (Note, of course, that they must have an iPhone or iPad to enjoy the sharing.)
What HomeKit encompasses
HomeKit hardware is available across many categories. We’ve reviewed relatively little of it so far, but these are the devices that have had the most positive general response from users and other reviewers. (Apple has a complete list of certified devices on its site at tinyurl.com/hmvb7dz.)
Lighting: Seemingly the most desired bit of home control is lighting. That might be because remotely controlling groups of lights before smart-home systems was expensive and complicated to install and operate.
Philips largely owns this category with its Hue products, which center around individually addressable LED bulbs, which can be purchased in dimmable soft white (2700K), an ambient white that can shift across the colour temperature range, and a bulb that combines ambient white features with the ability to use of shift through millions of colours. Hue requires a Philips Hue Bridge 2.0 to work with HomeKit.
Other companies make light switches and dimmers that can replace the ones you already have in your walls to control any light, though without the incredible granularity of a Hue.
Electrical outlets: Several companies offer in-wall and plug-in outlet replacements:
ConnectSense’s Smart Outlet has two separately controlled AC outlets, plus a USB charging port (connectsense.com). iHome has three models of Smartplug, which sport a single output and plug into an existing socket (ihomeaudiointl.com). Elgato Eve Energy (elgato.com/en) makes variants on a plug-in module that allows control over its single outlet while monitoring power usage through it.
Thermostat: The Nest (nest.com/uk) was the first smart-home device to make a real splash, and you have several options for options with HomeKit.
Honeywell (honeywelluk.com) offers a series of devices under the Lyric label that includes three options for thermostats.
Alarm: As with all alarm components and systems that can notify you of a problem, it requires an active internet connection at home; some advanced conventional alarm systems use a battery-backed cellular modem as a backup. Burglars might cut your cable, phone, or fiber, or you might have a power cut or network outage that could prevent
signalling. With that in mind, you can add many kinds of peace of mind very inexpensively, even on top of an existing alarm.
Honeywell’s Lyric series includes a water leak and freeze detector as well as a home security system. Elgato’s Eve series includes a door/ window contact sensor and a motion sensor.
Entry lock: Being able to unlock a door remotely, share access to it with a visitor, or get into your house when you have your smartphone (a crucial thing) and locked yourself out has a lot of value in saved time and fuss, and the cost of a locksmith.
Schlage’s Sense Smart Deadbolt (schlage.com) requires complete replacement, but includes Bluetooth and HomeKit integration, a keypad, and a regular keyhole. If you have multiple Kwikset deadbolts that are keyed alike, Kwikset’s new Premis entry lock can be instantly rekeyed to match them (kwikset.com). Yale will offer a HomeKit network module by the end of March that will enable its line of Yale Real Living Assure locks to work with HomeKit (yalehome.com).
Specialized: We should start seeing a greater variety of HomeKit devices that don’t fit into a single category or that offer controlling more outlying home features.
Netatmo’s Health Home Coach (netatmo.com) monitors indoor air for quality, humidity, temperature, and noise. It’s supposed to help you improve the quality and health of your house.
A similar device in Elgato’s Eve Room series (elgato.com/en) , the Wireless Indoor Sensor,
measures air quality, temperature, and humidity. There’s also an outdoor weather station version.
The smart home remains a hard sell
One of the big selling points in the past of home automation and remote control has been saving money by better controlling the home environment to respond to what you need and when you need it. So far, we’re not seeing enough full integration in the HomeKit world to make that case, except for thermostats. A better investment to reduce electrical bills is switching to LED bulbs, which also reduces your future bulb replacement costs due to their long lives.
Despite what is estimated to be at least tens of millions of smart-home accessories already sold – mostly in the thermostat category – there’s a lot
of room to grow. Blake Kozak, a principal analyst who tracks smart home and security technology trends at the research firm IHS Markit recently predicted that the penetration of smart home systems will reach just 3 percent by the year 2018, and only 7 percent by 2025.
If you want to be an early adopter, most everything discussed here can be plugged in or screwed in, or if you prefer the built-in look, you can replace your existing hardwired switches or outlets with HomeKit models. You’ll at least be able to operate them manually if you decide to give up on HomeKit down the road. And if Apple itself bails on HomeKit, it’s likely that one or more manufacturers will come forward with a bridge that enables HomeKit devices to communicate using whatever smart-home protocol ultimately wins the day.
In the meantime, you can definitely enjoy living a little in the future, but it’s likely big price drops are to come if the market develops. For our favourite HomeKit products, see opposite.