It is unbelievable how bad the homekit experience is. Randomly, my accessories will be unresponsive on the home app (despite working in alternative apps). Also, I’ve noticed issues of “phantom” accessories being in homekit even thought they are not listed. For example, I am currently troubleshooting my circle view doorbell. When trying to add it back to homekit, it says the accessory is already there, even though it’s nowhere to be found. I factory reset the doorbell and even went as far as to delete my home entirely in homekit and start from scratch with absolutely no luck. For a company that prides itself in user friendly experiences, this is shockingly bad.
If you want alternatives, I would recommend either Home Assistant (if you care about privacy) or Google Home (if you care about convenience). I would not bother wasting time with HomeKit.
If there are three things finally starting to break Apple’s grip on me as a customer, it’s 1. Lack of innovation on iPhone 2. Siri’s poor performance or ability to do anything more than simple instructions and 3. this app. You have to spend extra to buy limited HomeKit complaint stuff but this app feels like someone didn’t care at all. Besides looking incredibly boring/simple in a bad way and lacking a lot of customization, the design choices are rough (I have to click 3 times in the app to turning something on/off. Who thought of that for the user experience? This is made by Apple)? I’m more tech-familiar and even I was struggling with setting up automations.
Apple is slipping and can’t believe it but I’m starting to think about divesting myself of the ecosystem.
We have been using this app for over a year and it was great….until this last update. When we updated the iOS on our phones and iPads it updated the app apparently. Not if fan at all of this layout. Before all of the icons could be seen on one page and all we had to do was tap one to turn something on or off. Now we have to scroll through everything, find the one we’re looking for them open it and “slide” to turn it on or off. Major pain and just another app Tim Cook and crew has ruined.
I have plenty of smart devices (dishwasher, laundry machines, fridge, different lights, etc etc). The Apple HomeKit is the only product where I have to buy another product to set up any scheduled automation like turning the lights on or off, dimming for later in the evening or whatever is needed. This is silly, if you want me to buy more of your products make it easier to set up these automations not harder. This doesn’t make me want to buy an Apple TV or a HomePod or an IPad if my freaking phone can’t set up schedules for my freaking lights. Someone relay this to your Product Manager and let them know that showing contempt for your customers is a bad idea.
Something in the recent updates cause my old home app set up to disappear. I had to rebuild it from scratch which man I had to reset all my devices. This wasn’t too bad as I got it done in a fairly short period of time however, the scenes that I created needed to be re-ordered. I have an edit scenes section that allows you to rearrange the scenes. However, the changes don’t get reflected back in the main view. hopefully this is the only problem I find. Just noticed that the problem is only on my iPhone 14 Pro.
All right, I am back to edit the review that I wrote about a year ago (just over a year in fact). When Apple redesigned the look of the Home app, they must’ve made some architectural changes that fixed all of the issues we’ve been having. and with the updates from iOS 16.3, that came out today, not a single one of my devices (we have 63) say “no response“. Great job Apple, I’m a huge fan of yours but HomeKit has always been your weak point. Looks like that’s been solved. I’ll be back to give update and have no problem changing to five stars if it continues going down this path.
I feel that initially the Home app was so far behind and lacking. So many devices could not sync up with it. In the last year or so, a lot more has been made available with Thread and Matter. Now that I started digging into it with Homebridge along with getting a HomePod, I found the Home app to be very underrated. The fact that I can quick access from the pull-down menu or tell my AppleTV remote to do something has made accessibility and usability much better than what other smart home devices cannot achieve. I am in with Apple HomeKit now.
I use a couple of simple home automations that work OK. Now I’m replacing my security cameras and was excited to get something to use with HKSV. I got ecobee SmartCameras and set them up with HomeKit, but they don’t reliably record video and the camera interface is childishly useless. So, I setup the cameras through the ecobee app (which works great), will subscribe to their Smart Security plan when my free trial expires and will drop my iCloud plan back down to 50GB because I don’t need the camera feature now. Really disappointing because I wanted to do this just through HKSV if it had actually worked as advertised.
I think overall this app is fine and I really like the overall concept of being able to access your smart devices from a single app, however, there are bugs that need to be fixed that have persisted throughout multiple updates. For some reason, my homepods will not reveal themselves no matter what I do, and will stay hidden. I have tried replugging the homepod, reinstalling the app, and even reregistering the homepod. The homepod will only randomly show up on the app, but when I need it the most, such as checking if the correct alarms are set, it just doesn’t want to appear. All other devices have been able to see these homepods for some strange reason. Without the homepod showing up on the app, I would have to listen to Siri list out all of my alarms until it reaches the alarms that I actually wanted to check up on. However, everything else seems to be working as expected.
I use many Wemo smart plugs, automated Wi-Fi shades, wall switches and other Wi-Fi compatible devices. Half the the time the app shows my devices “updating” then they show the devices are “not responding”. I have fast reliable Wi-Fi coverage in my house. I have tried restarting my modem and routers but that is a pain in the neck and usually it’s only a short lived fix. I’ve tried resetting some of the smart plugs but that doesn’t appear to work for more than a day. I wish this app improved like Apple said it would with the new update and iOS 16.2, but the last update made no difference in the app’s reliability, responsiveness or stability. Disappointing to say the least.
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