| > We don’t rely heavily on HomeKit automations, collections of light and outlet states that trigger based on time or some other variable. 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. |