I'm probably alone in thinking home automation is a tremendous waste of time. I think there's maybe one exception, and that's being able to switch on heating remotely, which is actually useful. The rest is IMO gratuitous nerdery. Mildly interesting/fun: maybe. Needed: no.
In a world in which resources are scarce and everyone is getting fatter, getting off one's ass to switch on a light is probably a good thing...
I think you are getting it wrong, remote switching a light with your smartphone is almost a byproduct of home automation. Nice things you can have: turning on/off external lights at certain conditions; dim bathroom lights at night so if you go there in darkness you won't be blinded; turning off lights automatucally when you have kids that keep forgetting about it (I tell them each time anyway like in the old times just to teach them); blinders that go down at sunset, but only when it's cold enough outside etc etc. You might think you can live without this, you absolutely can, just like you can live without many other things.
You are conflating automation with remote control.
Replacing a lightswitch with an app that requires human interaction is indeed ridiculous.
Replacing a lightswitch with a motion sensor has been a staple feature of commercial buildings for decades.
Similar for heating control, occupancy detection, adaptive lighting, energy management, etc. Replacing a physical entity without adding any value to it is pointless, hence the 'automation' part of the phrase
It is actually the same number of trips on my end at least. Without phone control for my lights, I turn off the lights on the way to the couch, get comfortable in the dark (can't even see all my blankets), then look for the remote in the dark, and then start up a movie. With the phone control for my lights I go to the couch, do all that stuff in the light, and then dim the lights afterwards. The only difference is that I have to paw around for the remote longer in the first scenario.
While there is some resource waste because I'm not going to rip the old lightswitches and copper wires out of my apartment walls and, I dunno, recycle them or something, this doesn't seem to be a fundamental issue. The automated stuff is mostly wireless, so I guess we could save a bit of copper if we were to install it in lieu of switches. So really the issue is that the previous designer didn't correctly separate out UI from underlying functionality, that's their waste not mine!
As others have said, there many things which are much more practical to implement with "smarts".
In my case, I love my Hue (and similar) lights. It's not just a question of not getting off my ass to turn them on and off. It's the fact they can be dimmed, that at night if I get up I always press the same button, but the light won't blind me. I can also easily change the colors when I'm watching a movie, etc.
Yeah, I could probably buy separate dumb lights for each purpose, and turn them on or off according to the need of the moment. But I live in a small, rented apartment, so having random wires and tons of lamps all over the place would be much more painful than fiddling with an app (which actually works quite well).
However, I agree that the smarts should be able to be easily bypassed in case they don't work. With Hue, the lights can be configured to turn on automatically when powered on for example, so I can always turn on the light from my dumb wall switch if the controller is dead.
One thing that I always ask myself when starting down a thought process like this one is “But does it have accessibility benefits?” In this case, being able to turn on lights or raise blinds remotely has a clear and obvious benefit to people with motor difficulties.
I'm basically in agreement with you; while I've seen some good use cases for HA, much of it is indeed falling into some other camp (even the person who needed it to have a single place to adjust the 18 lamps in their basement; it is a bit of a luxury to have 18 separate lights in a room).
However, are you sure that resources are scarce? It seems to me we are rather too good at extracting them and turning them into commodities.
One big problem is usability. If you want something to turn on, the easiest way would be to have to ability to touch said thing and turn it on. Also security, planned obsolescence and so on.
I'm sure I'm "doing it wrong" but the lights on my homekit, bought directly from Apple, take 5 to 90 seconds to respond and worse, the Home App (by Apple) often gives zero indication it even noticed I pressed a button in the app.
in other words I'll press the off button for a room but there is no indication that it understood me and it's going to turn off the lights, then if I wait 5 to 90 seconds it may eventually turn them off, or not, try again. If I try again at the wrong time, as in just before it was about to actually turn them off then of course it turns them back on, repeat
my guess is apple only tests in some kind of ideal conditions and has no idea their system is so crap in others.
I've run into a few issues that are relatively easily solved.
My number one recommendation is to make sure your AppleTV home hub is wired.
Why? It is what relays signals when you are not on the local network and having it wired virtually guarantees the WiFi endpoints get the control command and you don't fall prey to things like client isolation blocking your command.
Especially if your WiFi equipment is Ubiquiti, this is a major pain point.
The same advice applies to WiFi capable network printers, for the same reasons as above.
I'm not sure Wifi has anything to do with it but then I have no idea how this stuff works. I have one Meross Smart Plug Mini. It's the only thing that shows up on my router. I have 11 Nanoleaf essentials A19 Bulb (https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HPE62ZM/A/nanoleaf-essent...). None of those show up on Wifi so no idea how they work (Bluetooth, Wifi Broadcast)
6 of them are less than 10 feet from the WiFi AP in the same room, and also less than 10ft from an AppleTV (3 are 5ft from it). The other 5 of them are in the next room (so less than 20ft from the AP). in that room I have no problem streaming 5-10 streams of simultaneous video over Wifi to my laptop
AppleTV is on wired network.
All of the lights are slow to respond. The ones on the same room as the AP and the ones away. It doesn't matter. The Meross plug, which is on Wifi, is almost always instant to respond, but, in the 6 months I've owned it it's entirely failed to respond at all 3 times (so once ever 2 months) at which point I go manually unplug it. Plugging it in immediately doesn't fix the issue but plugging it in a few days later seem to reset it.
The whole thing is super frustrating and feels not ready for prime time. I feel duped.
> My number one recommendation is to make sure your AppleTV home hub is wired.
Tragically, if you have the original ATV4 (September 2017), it's only got a 100Mb Ethernet port, which is embarassing for something released in 2017.
Even more tragically, when I use Plex, I often find it's hitting some weird bug in the ATV4 where it will be unable to stream 10Mbps videos when wired, but has absolutely no problem streaming those same videos when on wifi, despite being less than 20 feet of copper cabling between the apple tv, network switch, and the Plex server.
Of course, having an AC1700 wifi AP means that wifi is massively faster than wired for the ATV4, but shouldn't matter when the video peak bitrate is 10% of the max wired speed, but watching the monitoring of the server, the client is just requesting data at too low a rate.
Never bothered to actually pcap it to identify, but I'm willing to bet that some weird condition was triggering on the ATV4 resulting in too low a TCP window size being used.
Either way, "wired is always better" is generally true, unless you have an Apple TV 4th Generation. Then it's not always true.
..and even wired, my Hue lights are still slow to respond through Home.app, but immediate to respond to the physical zigbee button.
I frequent a bunch of home automation related subreddits and FB groups.
In 99% of the cases shitty HomeKit functionality is because of crappy WiFi. People are using whatever cheapo crap their ISP gave them for free.
1) Get a better WiFi access point, disable the integrated crap your ISP gave you
2) Use either a HomePod or an AppleTV as the home's central hub, don't connect it via wifi.
This will most likely fix any issues. I've got a wired AppleTV and Unifi for network stuff. I've had zero major issues with HomeKit. A few lights refuse to respond at points, but it's a Zigbee issue, nothing to do with HomeKit.
>In 99% of the cases shitty HomeKit functionality is because of crappy WiFi. People are using whatever cheapo crap their ISP gave them for free.
FWIW: I consider this to also be an Apple problem. Look, I have no idea how the Airport Express stacked up to the competition really, maybe it was junk, but it generally met my needs and was better than any of the other options I'd used in the past in terms of not having to fiddle with it much. Now imagine you are a consumer with no technical knowledge - do you buy a device or do you go along with whatever your ISP offers you? If Apple made a wifi device of some kind again, of course I'd buy it because I'm already in their ecosystem.
Also experienced issues with HomeKit - Philip’s (terrible IMO) latest update to the Hue app killed the iOS widgets feature and makes you use Shortcuts instead, which uses HomeKit.
I found lights frequently would not respond via Shortcuts/the widget that worked fine via the Hue app. I ended up buying the iConnectHue app which has a native widget and works perfectly.
Not sure what the difference between HomeKit and Hue protocol is in this scenario but it was definitely causing regular issues.
I'm using HomeKit with Philips Hue lights and I'm not observing any latency, even when using cellular. I think you're experiencing a bug, resetting some stuff might help (the bridge if you have one, or the network settings of a device if it only happens with one). It could also be something related to your wireless access point.
> We don’t rely heavily on HomeKit automations, collections of light and outlet states that trigger based on time or some other variable.
Good thing. Even the most basic multi-scene zone automations are challenging to “program” in Homekit.
The official Home app lacks an interface to reasonably create and administer:
“after 10 pm, if motion is detected by any of these four sensors, set these three lights to 30%. Do not turn them off until all of the motion sensors in this zone register as clear.”
This describes lighting a hallway and turning it back off to and from the bathroom.
I’m glad this author is comfortable talking to Siri all the time but I’d prefer to just get the automation right and use buttons for overrides. Siri requires a verbal response to homekit requests and they are almost always too loud and loquacious. Soft success or failure tones would be far preferable.
I spent a fair amount of time and money trying to make a pure homekit setup work. It did but it’s not scalable or maintainable.
It seems like there may be a plan around shortcuts but whatever it is needs to look like programming in Python. Not this set of unsortable, ungroupable table view cells.
If you look at homekit forums, you’ll see that the updates to HomePod have been disruptive to homekit, silently breaking automation until all HomePods have been restarted and contained bizarre bugs.
I generally like Apple products, but Homekit is the biggest mess of all categories right now. The head of the department left at the two year mark ~ a month ago. It will probably take some time for someone to step in and make serious progress.
I use Hubitat for the actual HA stuff in my house, and have HOOBS running as well which connects to it, and a bunch of other home stuff that isn't HomeKit native (Unifi Protect cameras, Ring alarm, etc) and creates devices.
The Home app is a fantastic dashboard which I use mainly to monitor state, as well as to control (mainly lights and shades) with Siri.
Hubitat does all the core automation stuff, like tying together multiple sensor states. It also acts as a Z-Wave and Zigbee hub.
I’ve spent the last few years turning my current apartment into a ‘smart’ HomeKit apartment. While there are some rough edges from time to time, there’s a lot to like about it overall. A few learnings from setting it up:
- the quality of HomeKit accessories you purchase matters a lot. Cheap unreviewed light switch? It will likely be unreliable and frustrating. It’s worth getting quality products.
- bad or unreliable Wi-Fi? Fix this first. Before upgrading to a newer mesh network, accessories were often unresponsive for me.
- Siri sucks. Despite this, HomePods are still a core piece of a HomeKit setup, and really make the home feel ‘smart’. Clear articulation and setting up scenes can help prevent Siri mishaps.
For me there’s no ‘one great thing’ that makes HomeKit worth it. The marginal benefit of having lights, shades, heating, and more accessible via voice/app all adds up.
Leaving the house? One button tap turns things off. Busy feeding the baby? Shades go down via voice command. Zoom meeting and the light in your background looks too bright? A few clicks, and it’s set to 50%. No one great thing, but lots of small nice-to-haves.
Recently switched from Alexa to HomePod for our HA stuff and haven’t looked back. Having native support in iOS is just so pleasurable to use. When we have guests, we add their phone to our Home app and they can control things in the house the same way we do. It’s lovely and intuitive.
Figured this might be a decent place to ask, does anyone know why the Home app is so bad but I don’t seem to see complaints about it? It’s by far the least responsive Apple app I’ve seen, it constantly outputs audio on the wrong device (e.g. to speakers even when AirPods are connected), it crashed if I scroll back to past camera videos, and maybe worst-of-all, the Mac app is somehow like a pre-multitasking iPad app. I guess it’s Catalyst, but other Catalyst apps work fine. Why does this one break as soon as it loses window focus?
More on topic, I’ve also been trying to ask Siri for stuff at home and toddlers are way smarter.
This might not help much, but I've not seen _any_ of the issues you mention above and I have a ton of cameras, sockets, HomePods and lights in my Home app.
My HomeKit home only consists of 2 smart plugs by Eve (evehome.com). They operate over Thread which our HomePod Mini enables. We have one for the lamps in the bedroom and one on our espresso machine. Coming downstairs to a warm espresso machine in the morning is great.
That you can leave for vacation, forget about this automation until well into your trip, and still be able to turn it off without calling the neighbors or your kin who might be living nearby.
Good read as I've heard/seen relatively few people fully automate their homes. There definitely are a lot of snags and Alexa/Amazon has their own share after watching my dad spend a few hours trying to integrate a stereo in with his many Alexa devices. We have a long way to go for sure.
A neat writup. I am sincerly curious about the speech interface: does it worth having the speech interface, if you have to mind not saying specific expressions at your own home because Siri might get confused? I thought people were more longing for the interface on phones (vs. walk up to a physical switch) and do not really want Siri or alikes.
As much as I love Apple products, Siri is my least favorite.
I just can't fathom why they can't get Siri right after all these years. She will just respond to something completely irrelevant once in a while, presumably because it sounded like a command issued to her.
The toddler comparison is spot on. Occasionally it's like she's busy doing something else (clearly MUCH more important,.. maybe she's mining bitcoin in the cloud?), instead of listening to my requests.
That being said, I still use Siri for things when I have my hands full. She can be a lifesaver.
Same here. I'm really looking forward to the tell-all book in a decade or two about what really went on with Siri and why it's still so so bad.
Not asking for miracles or "general-purpose AI" here, just decent speed, dependable consistency and general reliability. For example, Siri will correctly set a timer 90-95% of the time when you say a duration to it, like "5 minutes", but just sometimes, it doesn't understand what I'm talking about and gives an error speech.
I am a pretty big Apple user and I am mostly satisfied with the quality of e.g macOS, iOS etc. Been a "power user" on OS X / macOS for almost two decades.
> we can’t add Tonya’s iCloud account to the “home”
I've got the same problem with me and my partner. If any Apple engineer happens to read this this would be on my top 3 list of bugs to fix in the Apple ecosystem. The only workaround I'm aware of is creating entirely new Apple IDs.
Reminder: The Home app requires iCloud, and most data in iCloud (such as photos and backups) is not end to end encrypted, which allows Apple and the USG to read all of the data at any time without a warrant.
It makes these sorts of systems a nonstarter for me, personally.
That is just FUD. 99% of HomeKit automation happens on the LAN (in contrast to Alexa’s “let me pop open ports on your router and call external APIs for everything” approach), and iCloud is only used for setting up keys and remote access when outside the home.
In a world in which resources are scarce and everyone is getting fatter, getting off one's ass to switch on a light is probably a good thing...