“When Apple announced in 2014 that it was creating the HomeKit for iOS devices, I thought it would give the company a lead in the smart home,” Travis Hoium writes for The Motley Fool. “Smart devices like thermostats were already becoming popular, and more devices were likely to hit the market.”
“But the Home app didn’t make an appearance until 2016, and today, it’s still difficult to build a smart home, even if you use only HomeKit compatible products.,” Hoium writes. “Meanwhile, Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) Alexa has become a popular smart home hub, offering an ever-expanding number of commands that allow it to connect to Amazon as well as third-party apps. Apple hasn’t lost the battle for the home, but it will need to shift into high gear if it’s going to have a chance against Amazon.”
“It’s become clear that the open platform Amazon has built will grow in scale much faster than Apple’s HomeKit. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Apple is going to be left in the dust,” Hoium writes. “Setting up HomeKit isn’t exactly an ‘Apple-like’ experience. And that’s where the opportunity is. If Apple made buying, installing, and using smart home devices simple in the way that it has done with other technologies, it could command a decent share of the premium smart home market.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Apple could focus like they used to under competent management, HomeKit today wouldn’t seem like yet another half-assed hobby years after its introduction.
SEE ALSO:
How Apple’s HomeKit broke my digital heart – April 3, 2018
Apple’s HomeKit security screwup spotlights the risk of smart homes – December 8, 2017
Zero-day iOS HomeKit flaw allowed remote access to IoT devices including door locks, garage door openers; fix rolling out – December 8, 2017
Apple delays HomeKit launch until autumn – May 14, 2015
Indeed another bright idea introduced in a half assed way and then put on the back burner till they can find the odd engineer or marketeer to give it some love.
Tim Cook has led Apple deep into the dustbin of home automation.
Sigh…
Tim, why , why , why …..!?!
We purchased two Echo Dots for $90. We don’t use them for playing music, except through Bluetooth speakers. They seemlessly integrate with our Hue lights, Harmony hubs, Ooma phone system, and Amazon Fire devices. Not sure of the target audience for the HomePod….
They even have aux out… no bt needed for aux capable devices. One of mine is hooked up to a B&W A7. It can airplay but now I don’t have to.
Why do I feel like a sick person that just loves criticism by unworthy friends who just don’t understand the Apple Cult? And Steve… dammit I waited 3 days to see if the stone would roll away… why hast thou forsaken us?
Home automation was around long before Silicon Valley discovered it. There were established players who created hardware and protocols that most hobbyists and pros used in their HA systems, mainly X-10 and Insteon. These worked well enough until some fools decided to add wifi to the mix.
Then Apple stepped in and decided security was paramount and introduced draconian encryption and licensing requirements for HomeKit. The end result is the old, proven protocols are history, the legacy hardware is obsolete. We now have the ridiculous situation in “modern” HA systems where turning on a light bulb invokes so much handshaking and cyphers that the latency is measured in seconds. Sorry, but people in the real world are not impressed when a light bulb comes on two seconds after they flip the switch.
I can vouch for Koogeek smart plugs and light socket adapters. It shouldn’t be up to random Chinese companies to pick up the slack for Apple though. The “smart home” (at least one compatible with Homekit) is vaporware for 99.99% of users who aren’t going to spend $1000s on specialized lighting, blinds and…not much else actually, the ecosystem is paper thin. I was hoping to find an air monitor that I could use for home automation to turn on my air purifier once pollution levels reach a certain point, but this is a dream for now.
“If Apple could focus like they used to under competent management, HomeKit today wouldn’t seem like yet another half-assed hobby years after its introduction.”
Can not say it better. My home automation is not using a single Apple product as much as I wanted too. More buildings, more people, more money, that is what the new Apple is all about. Creating new exciting markets, taking care of their core products, with the exception of the phone, trying to get into every home and please their customers is what the new Apple is about. No real home automation, no Pro Mac for years, operating system need serious work, half baked products that are released because they just can’t get it right at introduction to just name a few, is the new Apple. Delight is a forgotten word not to mention, they just work.