Apple’s HomeKit platform is a great way to get into home automation, especially if you are deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem. You have options to control Apple TV, create personal automations that tie into your workouts from Apple Watch, control parameters of your iPhone, and much more. However, there are some limitations that really hold the platform back from being “the” automation platform for my home.
This article is going to focus on what’s missing from HomeKit, however I will also be writing an article on how I solved some of these issues by running a split system with HomeKit and HomeAssistant. Check back for that article soon.
No Hub Control
While you can use HomeKit without a hub, the best experience is having one in your home. This allows you to create automations and control your home from anywhere. You can use a spare iPad that is always at home, a HomePod (discontinued), a HomePod mini, or an Apple TV as your home hub. However, you cannot specify which hub is active- the platform decides for you. Let me give you an example.
In my home, I have two Apple TV 4k’s (one previous gen, one the latest) and two HomePod mini’s. One of the Apple TV’s is plugged into the network via ethernet, which would make it the best connection to the rest of the network. HomeKit often decides to use the HomePod mini (one of the two, it’s random it seems) as the main hub for the house. Now, I do have a great wireless setup using Ubiquiti’s Unifi lineup, but when the mini’s are running the show, I often receive a “not responding” error for most if not all of my devices when checking on my iPhone. A quick force close of the Home App and reopen shows them all responding. When the Apple TV is the primary hub, this issue goes away and everything runs fast and fluid.
You can turn off the home hub functionality on both the Apple TV and iPad, but this is not an option for the HomePod or HomePod mini, which is frustrating. One answer is to remove the HomePods from the network, but I personally like having them around for voice control over the home.
Apple really needs to allow us to choose a primary hub, then fall back to one of the other devices if the primary should be offline for some reason.
Let ME Decide What Security Options are Important
Shortcuts allows you to create very powerfully automations and scripts, but while you can create almost anything you want, the end result may not work as you intended.
Here’s a great example. Shane Whatley, a Youtuber who focuses on Apple’s HomeKit platform, recently released a video showing how to create a “home status” shortcut that will tell you if doors or windows are open, and even create a menu to allow you to interact with those devices if you wanted to close a garage door, for example. His video is great, and I even followed along to use some of the logic in my existing Shortcuts. But the problem is with Apple’s approach to security. When interacting with a door or lock, you cannot use the HomePod to run the Shortcut without first unlocking your iPhone. This unfortunately breaks the appeal of a HomePod to me.
Using Shane’s video above, I added logic to my “It’s Bedtime” Shortcut to check and see if the garage doors are open, and if they are, tell me about it so I can close them. I took this approach rather than actually closing the doors through the Shortcut because I know this isn’t possible. However, I would think that polling the status of a door or lock should be allowed through a HomePod without unlocking your iPhone. This is not true. If you have any interaction with a door or lock in Shortcuts, or if you simply ask Siri about a door or lock, you will need to unlock your phone.
By comparison, if you ask Alexa to open a garage door, you set up a voice PIN to keep the device secure. You can also check the status of a door- “Alexa, is the garage door open?”, without the need for a PIN, or you can close a door without a PIN as well.
The ability to at least check the status of a door or lock without the need to unlock your phone would open up a lot of possibilities in Shortcuts and Automations, but giving us the ability to toggle the security as a whole would be a nice feature. Let us decide if that is a security concern rather than Apple.
Dashboards and Home App
Many people agree that the Home App is in dire need of an update. Many of us HomeKit users were pretty disappointed with the release of iOS 15 that the app did not receive an overhaul. The app doesn’t really feature much customization as far as rearranging the tiles, and the choices of icons are extremely limited. This is also an issue if you’re one of us nerdy folk that mount tablets to our wall for a nice home dashboard. There are third-party apps out there that allow you to create dashboards or just to control your home, such as the Home+ app or the Eve app, but while both add some functionality, you lose some too.
On the subject of third-party apps, if you’re looking to set up any advanced automation, create backups of your home configuration, or monitor your Thread network, you will need to purchase or download one of a few of the available apps. The official Home app does not include many of these features, and that’s frustrating.
Lastly, did you spend a lot of time setting up backgrounds for each of your rooms in the Home app? Great! The issue is that these backgrounds do not sync between devices. If you did all this work on your iPad and pull out your phone, you will have to set it up again. Have other family members that use the Home app? You’d need to set it up for them too; and maintain any changes on all devices. This seems like a simple fix that would most certainly make a lot of users happy.
Conclusion and Other Thoughts
There are many great things about the HomeKit platform. No other home automation system will give you control over your Apple products like HomeKit and Shortcuts does. But some of the limitations make you look elsewhere to solve your home automation problems. Sometimes there are no alternatives, and we just have to deal with it, but I would love to see Apple give us more control over the system to make it work for our specific needs and wants. Why am I able to create a personal automation that kicks off a shortcut or control smart devices when I start a running workout, but not with a mixed cardio or cross training workout? I can create automations to send someone a text message when I arrive home, but I can’t have it run automatically without approving on my phone first.
What are your thoughts? Have you run into these limitations and find it frustrating? Or did you switch to another platform? Let us know in the comments below.
