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For devices that have been software upgraded, you’ll usually generate a software code. Save this as an image file for safety, as it’s a one-time process to do and your device will never be compatible with HomeKit without this. For devices that connect through a hub, such as the Philips Hue lights, you need only add that single device to the Apple Home app; all devices that connect through the bridge will be discovered automatically. For smart devices that don’t use a bridge, such as LIFX bulbs, each device has to be added independently, which is a bit of a pain.
Once devices have been discovered, they can be grouped into rooms and your Favourite devices appear both on the Home screen of the Home App and in iOS Control Centre. If you’d like to remote control your devices, you need a compatible fixed product at home that remains connected to your home network. This can be an Apple TV, an iPad that’s left plugged in or, more recently, a HomePod.
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Cleverly, any hub can be used to remote control any compatible Bluetooth devices. If you’ve got a Bluetooth smart lock, for example, you can control it from anywhere in the world, provided the device is within range of one of your HomeKit hubs. Apple Home and HomeKit – Device control Both iOS and macOS Home apps are laid out in a similar way, so it’s easy to jump between the two. All devices fit into uniform icons in the Home app, with little icons to let you know what the type of device is, such as a light bulb. The icons aren’t quite up to the usual standard of Apple products and are a little basic.
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If you have room names that are too long, Home can truncate them on the icon, which looks a little ugly: ‘Default Ro…’ for example, rather than ‘Default Room’. Some devices appear in the app that you can’t do anything with, such as the Apple TV and the Philips Hue Hub. These can clutter up the app, so I recommend putting them into one room out of the way. The HomePod smart speaker is managed through the Home App and tapping the icon will play/pause the last music selection. For devices that you can control, the options differ by device type.
With light bulbs, tapping or clicking the icon turns the light on or off. On iOS, a long press brings up a slider to adjust brightness or, depending on the bulb type, adjust colour and temperature. For macOS, getting the brightness control needs a right-click to select the Show Control option. It would have been nice if Apple had implemented Force Click support instead.
Thermostats give you a slider to adjust the temperature, although what happens depends on the device. For example, with a Tado Smart Thermostat, adjusting the temperature will put the thermostat into Manual mode. Depending on how you’ve configured Manual Mode in the Tado app the change can be permanent, for a set time or until the next scheduled change. Control, as you can see, isn’t quite as granular here as through the app. There’s no option to turn a room on or off with a single command, so you can’t control a bunch of lights together this way. Instead, you have to create Scenes, which lets you set default settings for lights and other devices. For example, you could have Movie Night, where you dim down the lights and stick up the temperature.
It’s trivial to create a Scene that turns everything off, but it would be nice to have this as a default. Scenes aren’t pulled through from other devices, either. So, if you’ve spent a lot of time making a scene in the Hue app, you can’t trigger it in the Home app and will have to replicate the settings with a HomeKit scene. Having your favourites available from Control Centre is a real bonus, as you can quickly get to your top devices or scenes.
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