It does however need a little bit more tweaking. I recently left Google and have been doing a full conversion over to everything Apple and iOS. The home should be revamped or at least the ability to put everything in the home visible in one spot and sections apart. All the items listed under favorites get automatically shoved into the notification section of a pulldown Home Screen and if you remove them you have to go through each room individually. I would prefer to just have one visible home area with all my items there, like full view of the rooms in one screen. The option to see it’s each room individually by clicking them is not intuitive and just more steps rather than having everything there visible on one screen.
Two solid years we’ve been finagling with this app and the dozen or so Home-Kit compatible switches/outlets we have purchased. 90% of the time the app displays our devices as either “unavailable” or “updating” (although automatic app updates are up to date for both Home-Kit and the devices associated).
Great idea to make one’s home smart with automation, but incredibly*** poor design and development on the app with Home-Kit compatible brands. Our home is far from smart with this technology and I’d recommend the mechanical outlet timers versus this any day.
Please figure this out, Apple. You should be ashamed to have your name tied to a product like this.
i have two homepod minis and of course use the home app. there are constant issues… “one sec”… “this is taking too long”… “hmmm something went wrong” or somesuch responses. lights work, don’t work, work. now i can’t even get a forecast w/out telling Siri my location. this always worked. now it doesn’t. and, i can’t get it to work following Siri’s wrong instructions. i guess i’ll have to spend my time searching for an answer online (not at apple).
apple makes good iphones, but it’s really a bumbling company otherwise. overpriced, behind the competition, buggy products.
stick w echo’s and Alexa. I have Echo’s near my home minis and they’re reliable.
I have been using the Home app since it was available publicly. Overall it works well although it it has at time taken longer then ideal load times to discover devices. (If I was eating only that I would give it 3-4 starts.) However I am giving it a 1 start primarily because if of the video streaming interface, atrocious load times and often freezing/crashing the app itself. Regret switching over to Apple HomeKit device for my video streaming. I did it in order to transition all my devices to work with one app but immediately regret it.
Video services with Apple HomeKit are in Bata stage at best and needs work. Although based on other costumers review I suspect the word it spreading and consumers are starting to stay away. Meaning Apple with likely discontinue the service in normal Apple fashion resulting in the discontinued service while dropping funds to fix the existing problem. If Apple wanted to fix it these issues, they would have already fixed them.
Outstanding bugs:
- no secure device automation prompts if you use CarPlay. Apparently Apple has no employees on HomeKit team who get in a car and drive somewhere and expect to respond to phantom prompts to lock doors.
- devices lag in connectivity
- poor thermostat standardization. If my ecobee is in heat at 71, and ecobee auto heat/cool is enabled, and I say “turn the thermostat down one degree” the ecobee, instead of turning down to 70, throws it’s hands up in confusion, enables auto heat/cool and picks random temperatures like 66/78
- Apple Watch responsiveness on a $750 series 7 on local WiFi is still slow, at best for a ~25 device home
UI/UX gripes
- less than sophisticated UI
- many settings are buried in odd swipes up or long presses
feature issues
- total lack of ad-hoc intelligence. Like “don’t run scene turn off outside lights today” or “turn the outsider lights on until 11”
- no concept of seasonality
- no way to override automations that lock/unlock things
- no means whatsoever to trouble shoot or debug scenes
Been using the Home app for a while and it’s just ok. The BIGGEST pain point with it is the stupid “No Response” errors with lights and cameras. I have done everything I can think of to make sure that the “No response” error doesn’t show up but nothing works. The ONLY way to make the error disappear is to put my device in airplane mode for about 15 seconds. Also, when I’m away from my home network and on LTE or 5G, I still get “No response” with my lights. But I can control them from the Hue app no problem.
Also, having an easier way to switch camera modes would be nice. It would be nice to not have to go into each individual camera, set it to stream and record when there are hundreds of ways to automate that. Even a home widget that could switch camera modes would be an improvement.
I’ve been using Home pretty much every day since launch. I have ~20 accessories connected to it and for the most part they work well. But despite lots of troubleshooting, I’d estimate that 30% of the time I open this app, everything in my house simply shows as disconnected. Routinely Siri is unable to accomplish tasks that rely on Home. There are no longer any Home widgets for the home screen, and the control center implementation often doesn’t actually match the state of what’s present in the Home app.
There’s a lot of good here. But also it’s way less consistent than the regular Apple standard. I assume some of the connectivity issues are because of my network setup, but I need clear pointers on what needs improvement. There should be more ways of diagnosing issues like that in Home. Ultimately if this is the application that will be used to control all sorts of basic functions like turning lights on, it needs to be a lot closer to 100% reliable.
I love the HomeKit ecosystem, and having local control and privacy integrated with my smart home devices. But the Home app has fallen behind, and feels largely unchanged in recent iOS releases. You’re still stuck with the same half dozen icons (or fewer) in each category, wallpapers don’t sync between devices, automations can’t be grouped into folders or sorted, favorite scenes can’t be sorted, advanced conditional automations need a third party app, there’s no widget, etc. Despite all of that, Home is still one of my most used apps and I’m still happy to be in the HomeKit world. I just wish the Home app would catch up to the potential of the ecosystem.
mountain.spider
caitlinmsweet
rconn2
ElBarto247
Nuclearxp
jedimasterkyle
HappyHowell
Chris Van Patten
