“For a device that’s likely to spend a lot of time in your home, it seems odd that Apple TV won’t get Apple’s new Home app,” Mikah Sargent writes for iMore.
“When iOS 10 ships this fall, it’ll feature an app made by Apple called Home that can control your HomeKit-enabled smart home products. As it stands, however, it’ll only be available on iOS devices and Apple Watch,” Sargent writes. “Apple’s touting the Apple TV’s upcoming ability to control your HomeKit-enabled smart home devices using Siri. You’ll be able to — much like you would on iOS — ask Siri to turn down the lights or adjust the thermostat, and Siri will happily oblige. But if you’re looking for granular, nuanced control, like what you’d find in a HomeKit app (including Apple’s upcoming Home app), you won’t find it in the next version of tvOS.”
Sargent writes, “Regardless of where I’ll be able to access it, I’m thrilled to have an Apple-designed HomeKit app, period.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps, eventually, Home.app will get an tvOS counterpart, but for now it’ll be fine to set things up on your iPad or iPhone and use Apple TV to simply control the scenes you’ve created.
Not being on tvOS is not a problem. That interface is perhaps the last place I’d want to setup and control home automation.
This is the stupidest idea ever. Here’s the User Experience this author is advocating:
Want to increase your home temperature by two degrees? Sure, you could just pull your phone out of your pocket, tap the app, and change the temperature in about five seconds. But instead, you can walk to your theater room, turn on the projector, wait for the bulb to warm up, turn on the AV receiver and select the Apple TV input, then launch the app and change the temperature, and then turn everything back off and walk back to where you started. Five minutes instead of five seconds? With innovation like that who needs enemas.
Yeah, that’s a pretty reasonable, non-biased comparison for how a tvOS app would be used.
Here’s another potential user experience the author *could be* advocating:
I’m on my couch, my phone is on the counter-top across the room from me. Use the Siri remote that I’m already holding, tap the app, change the temperature in about five seconds. But instead, I can walk over to the counter, pick up the phone, wait for it to unlock, find the Home.app, and change the temperature.
Of course, I could just use Siri on AppleTV.. or Hey Siri with the phone, or use Control Centre on the phone to access the settings quickly, or an Apple Watch… it’s almost like there are a bunch of different options available that are better/worse depending on the situation.
I’m just waiting for HomeKit to work reliably. Half the time the devices do not work primarily due to loss of contact.
The the next occasion I read a weblog, Hopefully so it doesnt disappoint me about this. I’m talking about, Yes, it was my choice to read, but I truly thought youd have some thing intriguing to express. All I hear is in fact plenty of whining about something you could fix should you ever werent too busy in search of attention.