Hmmm. Now what am I going to do with my laboriously (and lovingly) put together zigbee2mqtt/HomeKit setup? :)
Seriously now, I see this as a good thing, if only because we're likely to get an interoperability stamp of approval of some kind.
Right now, and were it not for my using an Open Source solution for my Zigbee gateway, it would be impossible for me to hook up Hue, Xiaomi, IKEA and other devices to Homekit without a bunch of different gateways (because some Zigbee endpoints simply refuse to talk to anything other than their own peers).
I also hope that they manage to do this without going the Google way of having everything open up ports on your router (some of the newer Nest-branded stuff already knows how to talk to peers on a LAN, but the security model for Google/Alexa integrations is fundamentally broken for me - WeMo support excluded).
So far HomeKit can run _completely_ on-premises, with all devices interacting on the LAN, which is great (except for remote connections through the Home app to your Apple TV home hub, and Siri voice recognition to trigger scenes), and that is why I decided to stick with it.
> were it not for my using an Open Source solution [...], it would be impossible for me to hook up [...] and other devices to Homekit without a bunch of different gateways (because some Zigbee endpoints simply refuse to talk to anything other than their own peers).
And worse, in my "casual" case, because some sort of Philips/Apple agreement outright prevents it :/
E.g. add a "Hue compatible", but non-Philips bulb to your Hue hub. It will work in the Hue app and via Amazon Echo, but Homekit will refuse to see it.
A way to "trick" homekit to be able to use the bulb with it, is to create a Hue scene, and sync it to homekit, but that is terrible for per-bulb control. This stuff is apparently all Zigbee, but the usability situation is an absolute mess.
Seriously now, I see this as a good thing, if only because we're likely to get an interoperability stamp of approval of some kind.
Right now, and were it not for my using an Open Source solution for my Zigbee gateway, it would be impossible for me to hook up Hue, Xiaomi, IKEA and other devices to Homekit without a bunch of different gateways (because some Zigbee endpoints simply refuse to talk to anything other than their own peers).
I also hope that they manage to do this without going the Google way of having everything open up ports on your router (some of the newer Nest-branded stuff already knows how to talk to peers on a LAN, but the security model for Google/Alexa integrations is fundamentally broken for me - WeMo support excluded).
So far HomeKit can run _completely_ on-premises, with all devices interacting on the LAN, which is great (except for remote connections through the Home app to your Apple TV home hub, and Siri voice recognition to trigger scenes), and that is why I decided to stick with it.