Smart homes are a funny topic. The idea is that they will make your home smarter: lights that turn on as you come home and off when you go to bed; a coffee machine that’s ready to make your morning cuppa when your alarm goes off; your door unlocking as you approach; your thermostat keeping your home at a comfortable temperature without you having to lift a finger. You get the idea. All sounds great, but the reality is quite different.
Many of us have a mismatch of devices in our homes, some of which play nicely together, while others fight like siblings vying for their parents’ attention. Before you know it, you’ve spent 10 minutes trying to get your lights to turn on when you could have just flicked the physical switch and be sat down with a cup of tea. That’s not smart – that’s a pain in the neck – and I haven’t even started on the setup of some of those devices yet, which can be a fresh level of hell.
I’d consider myself very competent at setting up smart home products. I’ve been doing it for a decade across a multitude of platforms, and I still battled with a security camera for several hours the other day. Not cool. So at Apple’s Welcome Home event in New York this week, one thing really stood out: one-tap connection and no extra apps. Praise be, are we finally where the smart home should always have been?
Let’s talk about the simple setup
At the launch event for Apple’s long-awaited smart display, HomeView, the company also announced the Apple Home Collection. If you got too wrapped up in the cute little HomeView with its square screen and missed the rest of the news, the Home Collection is a lineup of smart home accessories designed in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. This alone suggests Apple is finally taking the smart home sector seriously, something everyone expected when HomeKit launched in 2014, but which left many a little disappointed in the 10 years that followed.
The new collection includes indoor and outdoor cameras, thermostats, temperature sensors, and a video doorbell and door lock, though availability varies by region. For example, those in the UK won’t get the lock. I saw all the accessories at the event, and they are premium, mostly finished in aluminium rather than plastic, and exactly what you’d expect from Apple smart home accessories. Carlsberg adverts come to mind here – “If Apple did official smart home devices…”.
But the fancy finish is only one part of the story, and it’s not the part that will make people swap their Ring video doorbell or jump into setting up a smart home for the first time. It’s the simple connection. Like AirPods and AirTags, setting up the accessories starts with a single tap on the pop-up card on your iPhone, similar to what Google offers for its Nest devices on Android phones. There will be some extra steps – locks, wired doorbells and thermostats will always have a few extra layers compared to AirPods and AirTags – but the one-tap connection is a solid start.
The second thing that makes this collection exciting is that none of the accessories require a separate app or account. Everything is set up in the Apple Home app, and each accessory is encrypted end-to-end so LG Electronics, Schneider Electric, or Apple can’t read the data. They can work as standalone accessories or as part of a connected system, so you could start with the indoor camera and add the wired doorbell later, or invest in the full system.
Will it be enough for Apple to take the lead?
Whether people will go all-in on an Apple smart home will depend on what they already have at home. It’s no secret that Apple dropped the ball on the smart home a decade ago, as I alluded to above. HomeKit was announced in June 2014, a few months before Amazon announced Alexa and the original Echo speaker. A few compatible HomeKit devices arrived at the beginning of 2015, but it’s hardly been mentioned since.
In the same period, Amazon offered wide compatibility, affordable hardware to control devices, and cross-platform support. Google also got in on the action in 2018 with its Nest Hub (formerly Google Home Hub), which, like Amazon and Alexa, offered a way to add smart home devices from various brands, control them from one app, and set up routines to make everything work together. As such, both became the go-to options for the smart home over the last 10 years by making a complicated category reasonably simple, while HomeKit made it fussy with its strict criteria and limited compatibility.
That’s started to change slightly over the last couple of years, with Apple among the companies behind Matter, a connectivity standard that allows smart home devices from different brands to communicate seamlessly. As a result, more devices will now work with Apple’s Home app, but Matter still has some way to go, as some key devices, like Ring doorbells, and older devices, like Google Nest Cams, don’t support it. This means that anyone who invested in a smart home before 2022 (when the first Matter-compatible devices started shipping) will have to upgrade to take advantage of the more cohesive experience.
I am one of those people. Despite using Apple devices throughout my home, my smart home is predominantly run by Google Nest, with Ring, Tapo, Philips Hue and Ikea all bundled in too. That’s mainly because I preferred those products to Apple HomeKit-compatible ones at the time, and because Google offered something Apple didn’t when I first started building a smart home – wider compatibility with products and a solution for control.
That may change now, though. I am excited about the potential of HomeView and a device that brings everything together in a way the previous HomePods, which lacked a screen, never could. One-tap setup for devices excites me, and dealing with only one app, one account, and one subscription sounds like a dream. The HomeView smart home control interface also brings a level of polish that I don’t think you get on either Amazon’s Echo Show or Google’s Nest Hubs. It looks great, meaning Apple has an opportunity to bring the kind of slickness you’d only really expect from a custom install that would cost thousands.
I’m not convinced it’s enough to dethrone Alexa for those already using that platform to bring their smart home together (or as together as possible) – mainly because it would only really be advantageous for iPhone users, while the cost of replacing all those devices with Matter- or Apple HomeKit-compatible ones will be far from cheap.
There’s also the issue that you may lose access to some features on devices when using a Matter controller like HomeView, compared with the proprietary Philips Hue app, for example. But for anyone who’s been avoiding a smart home for fear of a complicated setup, Apple may have just given you the golden ticket to a smart home experience that’s easy to set up, seamless to control, and secure.
I’ll look forward to testing the new Home Collection to see whether it can deliver on its promises and convince me to upgrade my currently very fractured smart home into something that looks and feels like a smart home should.
Read more: After using Apple HomeView I think it’s the smart display you’ve been waiting for – just don’t bring your Ring doorbell
