iOS 10’s Home app
Get s tarted with… It’s taken a while, but iOS 10 gives HomeKit a much needed boost, in part thanks to a brand new app
How HomeKit has finally come of age with iOS 10.
Regular readers of these pages will be familiar with HomeKit, the centerpiece of Apple’s plans for home automation. It’s a piece of software built into iOS that allows products from different manufacturers to work together, perhaps turning on a thermostat such as the Ecobee3 when you leave work, and turning on your Philips Hue lights when the Eve Door & Window sensor detects you entering your home after sunset.
HomeKit got off to a fairly slow start until Apple unveiled iOS 10 at WWDC in June. There it showed off the brand new Home app, which makes it much easier to get all your different devices working together. In other words, there’s never been a better time to check out the latest HomeKit devices, and uncover Apple’s plans for home automation.
We’ve seen some amazing gadgets and devices in Apple Home in recent months, from color-changing lighting and musical fridges to more practical heating and healthcare products. All can be controlled from an iOS app, but things start to get complicated as you add more and more devices to your home.
For instance, when you leave for work each morning, you might want to turn off your lights and heating and turn on your security camera. Switching between apps to do all that could take so long that it’d be quicker to do things the old-fashioned way: by hand.
Integration with Control Center puts Home just as wipe away, even if your i OS device is locked
Apple designed HomeKit to solve that problem by allowing devices from different manufacturers to work together. So instead of using three different apps to control your lights, heating and security camera, you can use HomeKit to link your devices together and control them all with a single command.
That’s a great idea, but when HomeKit launched in 2014 it was buried in the depths of iOS, and was simply ignored by most makers of home automation devices. Thankfully, iOS 10 raises HomeKit’s profile, and provides major new features to help get the ball rolling for your smart home.
Coming home
Important technical changes to HomeKit in iOS 10 allow it to work with a wider range of devices. We were surprised to find HomeKit didn’t originally work with security cameras, so the addition of this to iOS 10 will help open up the home security market for Apple. Withings and Canary have told us they plan to add HomeKit support to their existing cameras, while D-Link is planning a new one for later this year.
The biggest change in iOS 10 is that HomeKit is supported by an official app. Simply called Home, it’s bundled with iOS, which should encourage more companies to support HomeKit – Apple has named several that have products planned.
Security products are an important type, and in addition to the various cameras that we’ve mentioned, there are products such as August’s Smart Lock that work with HomeKit. August’s Video Doorbell Cam shows who’s at your door, even when you’re away from home, so you can open the door for a delivery or to help out a family member who has forgotten their keys. August’s range is available from Amazon, and its products are primarily designed for deadbolt locks and fittings, but it’s worth checking to see if they’re suitable for your home before ordering.
Light it up!
Another key application of home automation is managing energy bills. Lighting is one area where HomeKit has always done well, with the popular
Philips Hue range and Nanoleaf’s eye-catching Smarter lights among the first products to support HomeKit. For many homes, though, heating is the biggest energy buster, and though there are several smart thermostats available, few so far support HomeKit. However, Ecobee has the HomeKit-enabled Ecobee3, along with Honeywell and its Lyric range of heating products. We’ve also seen a HomeKit version of the Netatmo Thermostat for sale on Apple’s UK online store – but, oddly, Netatmo didn’t want to talk to us about it or whether it would come to the US. Unfortunately, one of the biggest names in this field is unlikely to support HomeKit at all, as the popular Nest Thermostat is owned by Google, which is focused on its own Weave technology.
Some property developers plan to build HomeKit into new homes, providing control of lights, heating and even garage doors from the moment you move in.
Home and away
There’s more to HomeKit than just the Home app. Siri is an important part of Apple’s plans, enabling you to control your devices using voice commands. Siri is intelligent too – as well as simply turning a light on or off, you can issue specific commands such as “Dim the living room light to 50 percent,” or tell your thermostat to “Set the temperature to 72 degrees.”
Your HomeKit devices appear in iOS 10’s Control Center, so you can quickly adjust settings. There’s a Home app on Apple Watch too. Even Apple TV gets involved, as the third- and fourth-generation models can be used to remotely control HomeKit devices over the internet. Sadly, the Mac isn’t yet part of HomeKit at all. We’ve also heard rumors that Apple is planning a device that combines voice control with a speaker, to compete with the headline-grabbing Amazon Echo speaker and the forthcoming Google Home.
So, despite a slow start, iOS 10 is a real step forward for HomeKit and should ensure more devices become available for your Apple Home over the next few years.