Throughout each year, Apple holds a number of different events to announce new products and services and we’ve come to depend on a few of these events happening like clockwork and WWDC is one of them. At the beginning of every summer, thousands of programmers from all over the world ascend upon California and attend online conferences to learn about what new software features Apple has up its sleeves for macOS, iOS, tvOS, and watchOS in the coming year. This is also where we get our first glimpse of what we can expect in HomeKit for the impending software cycle. In this article, I go through some of the things I’d like to see come to our beloved home automation platform in 2019/2020.
Notifications based on accessories, scenes, automations, and sensor changes
One of the greatest things about home automation with HomeKit in general is the ability to receive alerts on your mobile device or computer keeping you up-to-date with what is going on in your home. In iOS 11, we got the addition of event triggers with maximum and minimum thresholds, as well as range. While this provides flexible functionality for automations, I think it could be improved upon by allowing for notifications based on these events. Imagine receiving a notification not just when the refrigerator door has been opened, but after it has stayed open for more than a minute. What if we got a notification once little Johnny’s bedroom light turned off, but only after 8:30 PM, to let us know that he, in theory, has gone to sleep? How about a notification when the outdoor temperature gets too hot letting you decide if you’d like to give the flowers a refreshing sprinkle? There are so many different uses for these types of notifications. Also, I’d like to see an option for allowing notifications when automations have been triggered. This would go a long way in keeping us informed of what is going on in our homes if we we are away or even just in a different part of the home.
Personalized Favorites
Another convenient feature of Apple’s Home app is device-based notifications. This is fantastic for those who may want to customize notifications between let’s say an iPhone and an iPad that acts as a central command center for the home. Expanding upon this idea, accessory and scene favorites customization from device to device or even just person to person would really improve the individual user experience. No one in a home uses that home in the exact same way and being able to customize our favorite scenes and devices for use in Control Center would encourage me to use it even more. Speaking of Control Center…
Home control as Widgets
One of the biggest, and most controversial, changes that we saw back in iOS 11 was Control Center. Home control moved from a dedicated page in Control Center to a “widget”. This change actually reduced the number of swipes and taps needed to get to our favorite accessories and scenes, but I think it could be even easier. From either the lock screen, home screen, or Notification Center, we can swipe right to get to our “Today View” which includes a list of widgets and this is where I feel Home control should live on iOS. As has been thoroughly taken advantage of by Home 3, we can have a more customizable experience in terms of different groupings such as zones and rooms, and not just accessories and scenes. A downside to this is that in order to access the Today View while inside of an app, we first must go to Notification Center and then swipe right but for me, this extra swipe seems fairly insignificant when compared to the increased utility Home control in the Today View would bring.
Apple TV
Apple TV has been a vital component of HomeKit for a long while acting as a bridge for remote access of home accessories and allowing for automations. With iOS 11 and the long awaited Airplay 2 support, we saw our Apple TVs show up in the Home app. To the dismay of many, myself included, our interactivity was limited to playing and pausing Airplay 2 streamed media. In a surprise move, HomeKit received support for televisions in early 2019 with iOS 12.2 and we are starting to see them come to market. With features such as turning the TV off and on, adjusting volume, and switching between inputs, Airplay 2 and HomeKit-compatible TVs are an intriguing addition to the platform, but I do think that those of us using Apple TVs could be included in this, at least to an extent. While maybe more integrated HomeKit support for Apple TV could be limited, it could definitely be used to turn off and on televisions using HDMI-CEC as well as adjust volume via the Home app or with Siri and having the ability to include these actions in scenes and automations just makes sense to me. Oh and, uh, why isn’t there an Apple TV version of the Home app yet? HomeKit notifications while watching Netflix, anyone?
HomePod
We waited and waited for HomePod and once we finally got it into our hands, we had to wait some more for promised features like Airplay 2 and stereo pairing, but alas they arrived and all is good in HomePod world…or is it? Essentially, HomePod is seemingly disconnected from HomeKit much in the way that Apple TV is. Sure, we must use the Home app to adjust the settings of the HomePod, we can turn it off and on, it’s a Home hub, but that’s really it. It’s not a HomeKit accessory, but it could be. Let us add playlists that are activated via scenes and automations. Let us use it to schedule a podcast at a certain time. Imagine asking your HomePod to play Miles Davis and the lights in the room dim and project a muted blue hue. So, OK, some of this is possible with Shortcuts, but in a not-so-intuitive and clunky way. Though we won’t likely see it in iOS 13, I’d also like audible notifications on HomePod. Imagine your HomePod announcing that a door or window was opened in a different part of the house. Very useful.
Favorites Widget inn Notification Center for macOS
In iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, we saw Home make its way over to macOS. While the interface is somewhat jagged and it could be argued that the app is a bit useless, something that would make HomeKit on macOS more useful would be Control Center-style Home control. In Notification Center on macOS, we have widgets for calculator, calendars, and stocks, but not for Home. What a missed opportunity! With a simple swipe, we could launch Notification Center and toggle a favorite scene or accessory in a matter of moments.
Macs as Home Hubs
HomeKit is an iOS framework and there is no arguing that and Home coming to macOS, in essence, had nothing at all to do with HomeKit specifically, but if we are going to run Home on macOS, it stands to reason that these systems could also act as Home hubs as well. If we examine commonalities between existing Home hubs, we see that they have a few things in common: Bluetooth, WiFi, and the fact that they, usually, stay in the home. If this is the case, Macs meet these criteria and I would argue even more so than an iPad. This goes along with the idea of Home on tvOS. There’s a bit of a disconnect that I think could be tidied up here. On a side note, let’s have those Macs be Airplay 2 devices as well.
Dynamic Lighting Scenes
Undoubtedly, if you are a fan of HomeKit, you have some sort of smart lighting and it’s probably likely that you have at least one color light somewhere in your setup. Many smart lighting manufacturers’ apps have some sort of lighting effects that they include as an added bonus of their product, but we don’t typically have access to these features in HomeKit. It seems to me that if we can automate lights to turn on and off at certain times and to change brightness and hue, then the platform should be capable of dynamic lighting scenes. I’m not saying we need anything extraordinarily complex, but a flashing scene, color loop, or music visualizer would be a nifty little addition.
Icons
The more and more HomeKit products we see come to market, the more and more ways people find to use them or places to put them and as our HomeKit homes grow, finding the exact accessory we are looking for can become a bit of a headache. This is where having a more robust collection of icons would really come in handy. For example, currently for lighting we have 4 icon options with nothing to identify light strips or even fixtures with multiple lights. In terms of contact sensors, we can only change icons based on whether we choose the sensors as a door, window, blind, or garage door. I don’t know about you, but I have more than one window in some rooms of my home and I would like to distinguish between them visually. As for scenes, there are 12 different labels we can employ and this simply isn’t enough to encompass the different types of scenes that I employ so I end up using, for example, a heart to represent a scene that turns all of my lights red which I use with automations that are triggered when motion is detected in my home when I’m not there. The Eve for HomeKit app does a great job of this, but unfortunately the icons don’t transfer to Apple’s Home app.
Hidden Accessories
This may seem like a strange request for HomeKit and understandably so, but I do feel it is warranted. I’ll give you the example of my bedroom. It contains an Eve Room, Phillips Hue Motion, and VOCOlinc Flowerbud. The Eve Room provides environmental data related to temperature, humidity, and air quality. The Phillips Hue Motion sensor also gives me a temperature reading and the Flowerbud gives me an additional humidity reading. This means I have two extra icons that I don’t really need making my bedroom in HomeKit unnecessarily cluttered. It’s also not crazy to think about adding, let’s say, Fibaro Door & Window sensors to both the window and door of this bedroom which would give me a total of 4 temperature sensor icons in a single room. I’d still like to be able to go into the settings of the device and find this information, but I’d like to be able to tidy up my room, too.
Alternative Naming
Recently, Andrew at AppleInsider gave us a really helpful tip for adding multiple names for a certain room to minimize potential Siri confusion by creating a zone with a single room. I’ve been employing similar workarounds for accessories by cleverly naming scenes with only a single action. Until Siri gets a bit more intuitive, it might be nice to build in an alternate name field for accessories, rooms, and even homes themselves.
Stability Improvements
As much as we here at myHomeKithome wave the HomeKit flag, it’s not all peaches and cream. HomeKit definitely has its shortcomings and no connected home platform is perfect. While by and large, accessories, scenes, and automations run without a hitch, they can get a bit clogged up from time to time. If this congestion on the internet super highway or faulty servers, it does happen and when you need your garage door to open or your light to turn on, you need it to happen then and there. More specifically though, I’ve personally experienced fairly regular inconsistencies with automation timeouts. Oddly, when I have an automation that has a timeout period programed, it triggers at the desired time, but there always seems to be a couple of accessories that don’t want to play ball. This means I have to fire up the ‘ol HomePod and frustratingly reprimand Siri for this lack of attention to detail. I know, it’s a terrible world that we live in.
The Home app on Android
As of recent, Apple has been shifting its focus more and more toward services. I see HomeKit, and the Home app, as a service. We also saw Apple extend its services reach into television in iOS12.3 assuringly to promote the forthcoming Apple TV+ service. So I don’t think it’s so far-fetched to see Apple’s Home app come to Android if only for control over accessories in a HomeKit home.
Final Thoughts
The rumor mill surrounding Apple hardware releases sometimes begins years before the product is even launched and increasingly we are seeing similar leaks on the software end of things. Reliable source Mark Gurman with Bloomberg dropped a slew of WWDC nuggets a few weeks prior to the event including hints that Apple may be planning to update the Home app to enable viewing of past camera recordings. The report also claims that Apple is planning to bring multi-user support to the HomePod via voice recognition. So if this and other reports hold true, WWDC should be an exciting event for the HomeKit world and we will definitely be watching and report on any and all HomeKit news that comes from the event.
Links & Resources
Andrew O’Hara’s HomeKit tips and tricks article for AppleInsider: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/05/02/our-favorite-tips-and-tricks-for-making-the-most-out-of-apple-homekit
Mark Gurman’s article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/apple-wwdc-2019-ios-13-macos-10-15-watchos-6-tvos-features
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