Reflections on a Year with HomeKit
tidbits.com
tidbits.com
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...
Replacing a lightswitch with an app that requires human interaction is indeed ridiculous.
Replacing a lightswitch with a motion sensor has been a staple feature of commercial buildings for decades.
Similar for heating control, occupancy detection, adaptive lighting, energy management, etc. Replacing a physical entity without adding any value to it is pointless, hence the 'automation' part of the phrase
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!
In my case, I love my Hue (and similar) lights. It's not just a question of not getting off my ass to turn them on and off. It's the fact they can be dimmed, that at night if I get up I always press the same button, but the light won't blind me. I can also easily change the colors when I'm watching a movie, etc.
Yeah, I could probably buy separate dumb lights for each purpose, and turn them on or off according to the need of the moment. But I live in a small, rented apartment, so having random wires and tons of lamps all over the place would be much more painful than fiddling with an app (which actually works quite well).
However, I agree that the smarts should be able to be easily bypassed in case they don't work. With Hue, the lights can be configured to turn on automatically when powered on for example, so I can always turn on the light from my dumb wall switch if the controller is dead.
However, are you sure that resources are scarce? It seems to me we are rather too good at extracting them and turning them into commodities.
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.
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.
I would not even bother with Homekit (or any other system) without a higher end wired home networking setup.
6 of them are less than 10 feet from the WiFi AP in the same room, and also less than 10ft from an AppleTV (3 are 5ft from it). The other 5 of them are in the next room (so less than 20ft from the AP). in that room I have no problem streaming 5-10 streams of simultaneous video over Wifi to my laptop
AppleTV is on wired network.
All of the lights are slow to respond. The ones on the same room as the AP and the ones away. It doesn't matter. The Meross plug, which is on Wifi, is almost always instant to respond, but, in the 6 months I've owned it it's entirely failed to respond at all 3 times (so once ever 2 months) at which point I go manually unplug it. Plugging it in immediately doesn't fix the issue but plugging it in a few days later seem to reset it.
The whole thing is super frustrating and feels not ready for prime time. I feel duped.
Tragically, if you have the original ATV4 (September 2017), it's only got a 100Mb Ethernet port, which is embarassing for something released in 2017.
Even more tragically, when I use Plex, I often find it's hitting some weird bug in the ATV4 where it will be unable to stream 10Mbps videos when wired, but has absolutely no problem streaming those same videos when on wifi, despite being less than 20 feet of copper cabling between the apple tv, network switch, and the Plex server.
Of course, having an AC1700 wifi AP means that wifi is massively faster than wired for the ATV4, but shouldn't matter when the video peak bitrate is 10% of the max wired speed, but watching the monitoring of the server, the client is just requesting data at too low a rate.
Never bothered to actually pcap it to identify, but I'm willing to bet that some weird condition was triggering on the ATV4 resulting in too low a TCP window size being used.
Either way, "wired is always better" is generally true, unless you have an Apple TV 4th Generation. Then it's not always true.
..and even wired, my Hue lights are still slow to respond through Home.app, but immediate to respond to the physical zigbee button.
In 99% of the cases shitty HomeKit functionality is because of crappy WiFi. People are using whatever cheapo crap their ISP gave them for free.
1) Get a better WiFi access point, disable the integrated crap your ISP gave you
2) Use either a HomePod or an AppleTV as the home's central hub, don't connect it via wifi.
FWIW: I consider this to also be an Apple problem. Look, I have no idea how the Airport Express stacked up to the competition really, maybe it was junk, but it generally met my needs and was better than any of the other options I'd used in the past in terms of not having to fiddle with it much. Now imagine you are a consumer with no technical knowledge - do you buy a device or do you go along with whatever your ISP offers you? If Apple made a wifi device of some kind again, of course I'd buy it because I'm already in their ecosystem.
I found lights frequently would not respond via Shortcuts/the widget that worked fine via the Hue app. I ended up buying the iConnectHue app which has a native widget and works perfectly.
Not sure what the difference between HomeKit and Hue protocol is in this scenario but it was definitely causing regular issues.
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.
The Home app is a fantastic dashboard which I use mainly to monitor state, as well as to control (mainly lights and shades) with Siri.
Hubitat does all the core automation stuff, like tying together multiple sensor states. It also acts as a Z-Wave and Zigbee hub.
NodeRED is also good for more advanced stuff.
- 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.
More on topic, I’ve also been trying to ask Siri for stuff at home and toddlers are way smarter.
They start at $6 price goes down to under $5 if you buy a 4 pack.
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.
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.
So .. frustrating.
Surely there are Apple employees reading HN? This is an embarrassment.
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.
It makes these sorts of systems a nonstarter for me, personally.
I'm talking about iCloud, not HomeKit.
If not I’ll have to go with Christopher Hitchens on this one.
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?