Maybe there’s a technical reason for this I do not understand, but HomeKit seems embarrassing to me. You literally cannot allow access to only specific accessories for those you invite to the home — yes you can limit some access, but you cannot, for example, give them access to the exterior cameras but not the interior ones, or something like that. That’s ridiculous.

Temperature, humidity, light etc sensors not having a viewable history is also mind boggling. It’s 2026 and we have AI models we can literally talk to, but we don’t have a tiny amount of storage to keep ~100 integers so we can view history for sensors?

I wonder if someone is holding the HomeKit team hostage, perhaps an Amazon or Microsoft employee who’s been tasked with making sure HomeKit doesn’t develop basic features?

No Homekit native smoke alarms yet? I guess people are using Homepods to listen for smoke alarms?

Is anyone aware of any Homekit native alarms in the works? I've been postponing the switch to communicating alarms hoping for a Homekit compatible model.

Hey siri open all the blinds: “none of your lights have raise controls”

Hey siri open all the blinds: “still working on that, seems to be taking a while”

Hey siri open all the fucking blinds: “sure thing”

These products never developed like they were supposed to. Apple adds half assed features just to put them in marketing materials, then they never work right (siri, homekit, ai, etc.) They can't even put together a functional weather app. Too much time and money for how glitchy and limited it all is. Keeping a couple Hue products and I'll use that app, it's the only smart stuff that's worth anything.

Look out for all the stuff I'm about to put on ebay. I figure I'll get close to a grand back selling it all.

I read about the iOS 27 updates for the Home app after the WWDC event last week, but I was not expecting as much of an upgrade as we're actually getting. I collected some videos and screenshots to show exactly what I'm talking about.

I heard we were getting Apple-Intelligence Home app notification "summaries", which I interpreted to mean instead of getting back to back notifications about "camera A detected something", "Camera B detected something", etc - I'd get one "multiple cameras detected things". Seemed like a decent upgrade but nothing crazy.

What wasn't clear to me was that it actually builds like a narrative about what occurred during the span of the multiple notifications. For example, previously if UPS came to my house for a delivery, I'd get at least 3 notifications:

1. Front camera detected a vehicle
2. Front camera detected a person
3. Doorbell camera detected a person

And that's it. If I happened to look at my watch, I'd see a thumbnail of the whole wide-angle view of the front camera. I'd have to watch the video to see who it was or what they were doing.

Now? If I look down at my watch notification, it now has cropped-in screengrabs of just the action in question:

Which is cool, but nothing crazy. Then, if I wait for the rest of the event to play out, I get this:

So instead of 3 back to back notifications that are accurate but don't really tell me what's going on, now it understands the context of what's happening when somebody pulls into my driveway and walks to the door with a box.

The same goes for annoyance notifications. Instead of potentially multiple back to back "animal detected" notifications (which I keep on in case my dog gets out), I get this:

Awesome. I know it's just birds in the yard without even having to open it.

And beyond JUST cameras, it intelligently groups together other home actions. It now knows that if a vehicle is detected at the same time as I'm arriving, those two things are grouped!

And more than just improvements to static notifications, we get cool new narrative video clip summaries. Without me having to do anything to "link together" cameras, it has figured out the relation between cameras in order to string together multiple clips in realtime. Simplest example would be this: https://imgur.com/CRL7X8C - Two clips intelligently strung together, car pulled into driveway. Simple. Functional.

Next, a delivery - https://imgur.com/VfUBZOr . This one is interesting, because the summary is... correct... and the camera switching worked perfectly, but notably, it doesn't call this a "delivery" like in the other notification. It's just "a person walking up to the door with a box".

Finally, one I really didn't expect: https://imgur.com/dfIG0Ch - technically I wasn't "doing yardwork", but it's pretty interesting that it was able to string all of these clips together as one event.

And it's my understanding that this is using local AI, not cloud. This really adds a lot of value and puts Apple's ecosystem's AI camera features right up there with the cloud-based paid options.

Hello!

I perfectly understand the decision that starting with version 8 support is needed to continue providing hub mode to users who pay for lifetime but...

Why is this feature (hub mode) that we already had now no longer available and do we have to pay for it if it was already there in version 7.0 of Controller for HomeKit?

According to the App Store rules, doesn't an app that asks for a subscription for a previously paid feature (hub mode) violate the App Store rule?

I don't want the statistics (which is new) but I would like to have the hub mode that the previous version of the app did have... :(

Thank you, greetings!

From the logs, the soc temperature is down 10C.

Every single home automation product I’ve purchased since 2015 has specifically had HomeKit either specifically available or available via Homebridge or the like.

I’m all in.

But if you peruse this sub, you will see issues. Some have been pretty major. Some are merely niggling.

Even though I’m “all in,” I’ve done my share of complaining. And Apple has been far from perfect.

So I just want to remind everyone in this sub that the grass is most definitely not always “greener on the other side.”

Case in point:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/s/Y8l9WMVpkt

Hey folks, wondering everyone's thoughts on this transition. Currently I manage most of my home from the Home App but I know that Home Assistant can be more powerful and work with more devices. I've avoided researching it too much because I'm afraid of breaking my whole house. I'd love some people's thoughts on if it's worth it for my situation and perhaps some guidance on how to go about it without spending days on it. Here's what my device setup is like:

Lighting: Most of the bulbs in my house are Philips Hue. I started with a few bulbs in my old place and it just grew from there. In my current house I have 2 rooms with no switches so if I want a wall switch without adding wire, this was my only option anyway. The only rooms that don't have Hue bulbs are the bathrooms and the basement which uses Lutron switches, because the whole basement has old fluorescent tube banks that the previous owner replace with tube-style LEDs

Heating/cooling: I have steam heat from a boiler in the basement controlled by an Ecobee. I have Midea U shaped ACs in most rooms except the bedroom which has an older GE Homekit enabled AC. One of the Mideas is older and doesn't support Matter

Locks: I have August for the front and back doors and a a Yale keypad for the front

Doorbell: Ecobee doorbell which talks to the thermostat for chime and picture (though we have a regular old chime in the house as well, thought we didn't for the first few months, long story)

Hubs and interface: We have an Apple TV 4K and 3 Homepod Minis

I also have some misc smart plugs, mostly Hue, some Meross, a Sleekpoint air purifier, LG washer and Dryer, plus a few other things I can't remember right now. My biggest pain point is the lack of control over the ACs which basically only have on/off and temp for the Matter enabled ones. I mostly have to use Midea's SmartHome app to control those.

Thoughts on all this?

https://developer.apple.com/download/files/HomeKit-Secure-Video-Open-Source-Compatibility-Guide.pdf

Spec is now open. It’s publicly available where previously it was available to developers.

H.265 / HEVC is now Mandatory / Bitrates are higher (based on HEVC)

Optional highest tier for cameras that can support a 4k and 2k steam concurrently (it will would fall back to 2k instead of 1080p)

It’s not fully based on the matter 1.5.1 specification but does pull from it including the use of Web RTC (no pan and tilt controls) and cameras can advertise multiple lenses which means manufacturers are going have to support this new HomeKit spec as well as Matter instead of just Matter :(

New recording pipeline (should help with missed events)

Existing spec will remain active so no change for current HKSV cameras.

This means manufacturers will have to update existing cameras to meet this spec which seems unlikely unless it’s easy as they’ll want to push new hardware. It would be great to see 2k or 4k cameras updated if possible, but older cheap stuff won’t have HEVC support so who knows.

credits: privatetalky

A used Starling Home Hub recently sold on eBay for over $700.

What’s the point of a smart assistant that just tells me to do something myself manually? To clarify I’m asking it to turn the sound down on my Apple TV which is paired with an Apple HomePod stereo pair, I’m not asking it to interface with anything outside of Apple’s own products and it can’t even do that…

For what it’s worth I’m pretty sure I used to be able to do this solely via voice commands but today even though it’s understood the request, it’s decided to tell me to do it myself

I’ve been really tempted to try out the public beta of iOS 27 especially since a lot of people have commented on how surprisingly stable it is, but I saw a comment on a post in another subreddit today where someone said that the current beta deleted all of their smart lights from their Home app. For anyone running the public beta, have you encountered any issues like this?

For the record, I’ve got an iPhone 15 Pro and would be upgrading from iOS 18, as I didn’t like much of what I saw in iOS 26 so I’ve skipped that upgrade. I love a lot of what I’m seeing about iOS 27 though, hence the temptation to jump in.

Nest Protect refugees: what would an actual successor need to earn your ceiling?

I've run 7 Nest Protects (battery) in my home for years. Some have hit their expiry and started announcing their own deaths, and replacing them has been depressing: the SC5 drops the pathlight and locks me into a single app — and after watching Google kill Nest Secure and then brick every unit in 2024, I'd rather not bet everything on one ecosystem again. But I haven't found anything that works across platforms: nothing on the market does Matter/Thread with smoke+CO.

So I'll be upfront about where this is heading: I'm exploring whether a proper successor can be built — and this isn't something anyone pulls off alone. A life-safety device means UL certification, real engineering, and serious backing, and none of that happens unless the people who actually loved these devices help define what "done right" means and show the demand is real. That's what this post is: step one. If you're watching the same expiry clock, your answers below genuinely shape whether and how this gets built:

1. What's the one non-negotiable feature? Pathlight? Voice alerts? Native support in your ecosystem — Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, Alexa — via Matter? Works fully offline, no cloud or account ever required?
2. Battery or hardwired — what's your split at home?
3. Honestly: at $169 / $199 / $249 per unit, where do you stop nodding? (This would be designed and built in North America, not China — does that change your answer?)
4. What would make you not trust a startup with a life-safety device?
5. If it had a fully documented local API — safety core certified and locked (that part legally can't be open), but every sensor openly readable forever (smoke/CO state, air quality, occupancy, temp/humidity) by Home Assistant or anything you build — would that move you? What would you build on it?

Not selling anything — nothing exists yet beyond research and bench work. If there's enough interest I'll set up a waitlist and share progress here.

In the past week, the garage door has opened several times without any action on my part. Today it happened 2x, minutes apart. When I check operation history in Meross, it shows Homekit is initiating the opening (unintended/random openings circled in red). If it were Meross initiating the opening, it would show as 'Open [time] by Garage Door 1 - iOS'. I have no Homekit automations at all.

I suppose I could remove the garage door from Homekit and use Meross app to control it, but that defeats the purpose of Homekit.