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Reflections on a Year with HomeKit

40 points by fudgy 5y ago

daxuak 5y ago
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.
- sgt 5y ago
  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.
  - aemreunal 5y ago
    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.
    - sgt 5y ago
      I literally just asked Siri: "set a timer for 5 minutes". She responded with: "I set your alarm for 5AM". So .. frustrating. Surely there are Apple employees reading HN? This is an embarrassment.
      - aemreunal 5y ago
        They don't even need to read HN, I'm wondering if they even use the thing at all! Same goes for pretty much all of their software...
        sgt 5y ago
        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.
gleenn 5y ago
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.
asiachick 5y ago
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.
- mvkel 5y ago
  This is the first I’ve heard of HomeKit having these delays. You sure it’s not connecting via 2.4ghz and hitting interference?
- fathyb 5y ago
  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.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago
  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.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Wired connections to Apple TVs and numerous wired access points make a world of difference. And good quality routers/access points. I would not even bother with Homekit (or any other system) without a higher end wired home networking setup.
mvkel 5y ago
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.
BooneJS 5y ago
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.
- pvitz 5y ago
  Just curious: What is the advantage of this setup over a timer switch socket for the Espresso machine?
  - nier 5y ago
    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.
    - drcongo 5y ago
      Or just have it not active if nobody is home.
  - BoorishBears 5y ago
    The most basic Wi-Fi enabled plug is cheaper than a timer switch. They start at $6 price goes down to under $5 if you buy a 4 pack.
  - BooneJS 5y ago
    Different schedules. If I weren't worried about having it on for an hour longer than necessary, I guess a timer would be fine.
MrksHfmn 5y ago
And for those who like to tinker and want to integrate all devices into homekit: homebridge https://homebridge.io https://homebridge.io
bredren 5y ago
> 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.
- azinman2 5y ago
  What are you using instead to make such automations?
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    Home Assistant is good. NodeRED is also good for more advanced stuff.
  - andylynch 5y ago
    Not gp but I have home assistant to do this and it plays very nicely with HomeKit.
  - bredren 5y ago
dmje 5y ago
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...
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  I agree, there is some convenience when it works but when it doesn’t it’s so infuriating that it undoes all the previous convenience.
- darkwater 5y ago
  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.
- allendoerfer 5y ago
  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.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  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!
sneak 5y ago
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.
- andylynch 5y ago
  Have you looked at home assistant? It can control most things locally without any cloud (including HomeKit accessories)
  - sneak 5y ago
    I have. The Home Assistant iOS mobile app has embedded spyware.
    - andylynch 5y ago
      I’m surprised to hear that given that is antithetical to the project’s goals and policies. Do you have any details on this spyware?
      - wrboyce 5y ago
        I too am surprised to hear this. GP can you point to said spyware in the GitHub repo? https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS If not I’ll have to go with Christopher Hitchens on this one.
        sneak 5y ago
        It's right there on the privacy label in the App Store.
        wrboyce 5y ago
        Data not linked to you Identifiers: Device ID Usage Data: Product Interaction Diagnostics: Crash Data Performance Data I don’t see anything untoward here. Can you provide evidence to explicitly support your claim or not?
jbverschoor 5y ago
Man.. the beginning of these tracks sound a lot like the alarm sounds on iOS.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCJKdajjYYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCJKdajjYYM
aikinai 5y ago
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.
- drcongo 5y ago
  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.
jonathanberger 5y ago
> 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.
jordansmithnz 5y ago
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.
georgeoliver 5y ago
I do think home automation is valuable but it also seems like a band-aid over the unnecessary complexity of some building systems.

40 points by fudgy 5y ago

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.

sgt 5y ago
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.
- aemreunal 5y ago
  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.
  - sgt 5y ago
    I literally just asked Siri: "set a timer for 5 minutes". She responded with: "I set your alarm for 5AM". So .. frustrating. Surely there are Apple employees reading HN? This is an embarrassment.
    - aemreunal 5y ago
      They don't even need to read HN, I'm wondering if they even use the thing at all! Same goes for pretty much all of their software...
      - sgt 5y ago
        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.

gleenn 5y ago

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.

asiachick 5y ago

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.

mvkel 5y ago
This is the first I’ve heard of HomeKit having these delays. You sure it’s not connecting via 2.4ghz and hitting interference?
fathyb 5y ago
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.
InvaderFizz 5y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Wired connections to Apple TVs and numerous wired access points make a world of difference. And good quality routers/access points. I would not even bother with Homekit (or any other system) without a higher end wired home networking setup.

mvkel 5y ago

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.

BooneJS 5y ago

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.

pvitz 5y ago
Just curious: What is the advantage of this setup over a timer switch socket for the Espresso machine?
- nier 5y ago
  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.
  - drcongo 5y ago
    Or just have it not active if nobody is home.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  The most basic Wi-Fi enabled plug is cheaper than a timer switch. They start at $6 price goes down to under $5 if you buy a 4 pack.
- BooneJS 5y ago
  Different schedules. If I weren't worried about having it on for an hour longer than necessary, I guess a timer would be fine.

MrksHfmn 5y ago

And for those who like to tinker and want to integrate all devices into homekit: homebridge https://homebridge.io https://homebridge.io

bredren 5y ago

> 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.

azinman2 5y ago
What are you using instead to make such automations?
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  Home Assistant is good. NodeRED is also good for more advanced stuff.
- andylynch 5y ago
  Not gp but I have home assistant to do this and it plays very nicely with HomeKit.
- bredren 5y ago

dmje 5y ago

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...

simonbarker87 5y ago
I agree, there is some convenience when it works but when it doesn’t it’s so infuriating that it undoes all the previous convenience.
darkwater 5y ago
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.
allendoerfer 5y ago
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.
bee_rider 5y ago
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!

sneak 5y ago

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.

andylynch 5y ago
Have you looked at home assistant? It can control most things locally without any cloud (including HomeKit accessories)
- sneak 5y ago
  I have. The Home Assistant iOS mobile app has embedded spyware.
  - andylynch 5y ago
    I’m surprised to hear that given that is antithetical to the project’s goals and policies. Do you have any details on this spyware?
    - wrboyce 5y ago
      I too am surprised to hear this. GP can you point to said spyware in the GitHub repo? https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS https://github.com/home-assistant/iOS If not I’ll have to go with Christopher Hitchens on this one.
      - sneak 5y ago
        It's right there on the privacy label in the App Store.
        wrboyce 5y ago
        Data not linked to you Identifiers: Device ID Usage Data: Product Interaction Diagnostics: Crash Data Performance Data I don’t see anything untoward here. Can you provide evidence to explicitly support your claim or not?

jbverschoor 5y ago

Man.. the beginning of these tracks sound a lot like the alarm sounds on iOS.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCJKdajjYYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCJKdajjYYM

aikinai 5y ago

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.

drcongo 5y ago
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.

jonathanberger 5y ago

> 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.

jordansmithnz 5y ago

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.

georgeoliver 5y ago

I do think home automation is valuable but it also seems like a band-aid over the unnecessary complexity of some building systems.