Best application for Apple HomeKit

Every little while this question comes up in the Telegram groupespecially for colleagues who start automating shares at home. When you start buying and installing devices at home it is common for them to be from the same manufacturer, so it’s easy to handle them from a single application. But once you start introducing different manufacturers, gridges, automations… What is the best application to handle all connected devices? Let’s see if we can give a clear answer.

Application of Philips Hue

I have friends who only have Philips Hue devices at home. Between the light bulbs, the smart-button and smart plugs have all your needs covered, so you just have to use the Philips Hue application to manage everything. It is available on both iOS and Android.

If you don’t have other devices, the Hue app is very good and allows you to do things directly from the application that you can’t do as soon as you integrate the devices with one of the most standard ecosystems like Apple HomeKit, Google Home or Alexa. Is it true that some specific features of the application are not that they are too useful… but what’s cool to wake you up with the ‘Stretch on the savannah’ environment that the application has? I don’t know what the sunset will look like in the middle of the African savannah, but the environment is cool and generates a combination of red-yellowish colors that with a little imagination can come up the sunset… well, with

A lot of imagination.

Of course you can automate the hours you want the lights or the smart plugs to turn on, the behavior of the smart-button at different hours of the day for the lights to be lit with greater or less intensity, etc.

IMPORTANT: The Hue application has a major failure with the management of rooms and rooms. If you integrate with HomeKit, every time you add a new bulb you will get a notice to synchronize the stays with the Apple House app you have to respond to that NO because if you answer that YES you are lost, you load up the House rooms and you stay all the devices in the default stay! For example, it has been my turn to put my hand on Aqara’s temperature sensors one by one to see what is the temperature rising and then to associate it back to the right room. A disaster. However, if SOLO uses

The Hue app is not integrated with Homekit, everything works perfect.

Application of Aqara Smart Home or Xiaomi Home

If all your devices belong to the Aqara ecosystem, you can manage them both from the Aqara Smart Home app and from Xiaomi Home. Both are available for Android and iOS.

I don’t know if you know that the Aqara brand belongs to Xiaomi, it’s simply the division for smart-home, but all of the Aqara and Xiaomi devices are compatible and can be linked to both the Aqara app and the Xiaomi app. So, what do we use? There are actually not too many differences between each other today, but remember that once you start using one of the two you will no longer be able to change the other without having to relink all your devices.

I started using the Aqara app but he wouldn’t let me set the bridge alarm. Well, I let it be set up in a very basic way, but some configurations such as the activation delay so that you can get out of the house, the sound you want me to make and the others couldn’t be set up… so I migrated to Xiaomi Home for a lot of years… although I have now returned to Aqara’s because they have added the possibility to integrate directly with HomeKit, without having to login on the application or anything like that. I have to investigate how the bridge firmware updates work, but it seems useful and transparent at the moment.

With the Xiaomi Home app I won not only in customization, but also has a small log where you can see for example if any Aqara switch has been pressed, if the door has opened or the temperature of the last month that has detected the living room sensor. Ah, and if you have any Xiaomi devices like the electric skateboard or the Vacuum vacuum cleaner, you see everything from the same app and you can get to automate some actions.

But remember, just for the Aqara / Xiaomi devices, you can’t interact with other devices outside the ecosystem even though the latest gridges are Zigbee 3.0, which can give the false idea that any zigbee 3.0 device could be linked to the ecosystem… and no, they simply communicate with the bridge using the standard, but they do not allow the incorporation of external devices into the Aqara / Xiaomi ecosystem.

Apple House Application

Contrary to what happens with Philips and Aqara / Xiami, Apple does not have its own devices (for now! could change this in the future according to some rumors), but it has the HomeKit standard that allows to link any compatible device with the Apple House application. There are many devices officially sold by Apple on its website, and many others in which you will find HomeKit sticker even if they are not available directly on the official website.

When we have an Apple HomeKit-compatible device we can configure it from both the manufacturer’s own application and from Home. But yes, both are needed, as the initial configuration must be done from the manufacturer’s own application… and often the ‘fine’ configuration is also available only in the manufacturer’s application, integrating only the basic functions with Apple House.

This is not usually a problem as the benefits are much greater: we can automate actions with the other compatible devices. For example, if we have a Hue bulb (which is compatible with Apple HomeKit), an Eve temperature sensor (compatible with Apple HomeKit) and an Aqara switch (which is also compatible with Apple HomeKit), we can make the bulb turn on in blue tones when pressing the switch if that day is going to be very cold and in reddish tones if it’s going to be a particularly hot day… all of that in an automated and unattended way, of course.

In addition, for a few versions the Apple House app is integrated with Apple shortcuts, so we can create automations with advanced conditions, that have to be fulfilled all or that is enough with any of them to be fulfilled, introduce the iPhone geopposition… almost anything we think of… but as long as you can create shortcuts, of course, which is not always simple.

Home + v5

And with this we get to my favorite app, even though it’s not cheap. Home + It’s kind of a steroid house app to allow us a lot of extra features and make life easier. With Home + you no longer need to know about programming or scribing to create complex automations, as the same application makes it very simple and suggests connections and conditions.

In addition, it allows us to create groups of devices, so we can for example create a group of lights in the rooms and ask Siri ‘Hey Siri, turn on the lights in the rooms’ and it will light those lights without creating a specific scene, although of course we can create scenes in the same way as we do from the Home App.

In my case I use Home + as the main app, the House app I open only once in a while to try to debugging some error or automation that is not working as it should and I want to see if it gets home well… but it’s not my usual app. With integration with ‘Attacks’, House has gained a lot of flexibility, but the Attacks are still quite complicated to create, while with Home + they are created in a much more natural way.

If you are an Apple Watch holder and want to manage some of your Home devices through the native application, you will see that ALL of them come out on a huge and messy list. Finding the device you’re looking for can take you a few seconds to go through the list up and down. With Home + you can mark some devices as’ Favorites’ and will be synchronized with the Apple Watch, so you can easily access these more common devices.

The only inconvenience I see (to put it in some way) is the following: When you create an automation in House, an environment is automatically generated that is hidden. However, when you create an automation from some other application such as Home +, it generates the environment with a rare name that is visible through the Home application. If you don’t get into House there’s no problem because you don’t see it, so if you manage everything from Home + and you don’t know about this, but if you get in for something in House you’ll see a lot of environments with weird names and I don’t particularly like it. This is because Apple by default hides its environments to make it look nicer, unqu

and does not allow to do so with third-party apps.

Finally, Home + allows you to make a backup of devices and automations, so if you ever lose this data from your iCloud account (God forbid it), you can recover them in a very simple way by re-establishing the backup.

I hope I helped you a little bit in deciding what app to use to manage all your connected devices!

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