Best app for Apple HomeKit

Every so often this question comes up in the Telegram group, especially from folks who are just starting to automate things at home. When you start buying and installing devices at home, it’s common for them all to be from the same manufacturer, which makes it easy to control them from a single app. But once you start bringing in different manufacturers, bridges, automations… which is the best app to manage all your connected devices? Let’s see if we can give a clear answer.

Philips Hue App

I have friends who only have Philips Hue devices at home. Between the bulbs, the smart-buttons and the smart plugs, all their needs are covered, so they simply use the Philips Hue app to manage everything. It’s available on both iOS and Android. If you don’t have other types of devices, the Hue app is really, really good and lets you do things directly from the app that you can’t do once you integrate the devices with one of the more standard ecosystems like Apple HomeKit, Google Home, or Alexa. It’s true that some of the app’s own features aren’t exactly super useful… but come on, how cool is waking up to the app’s ‘Savannah Sunset’ ambiance? I have no idea what a real sunset in the middle of the African savannah looks like, but the ambiance is pretty nice and creates a reddish-yellow color combination that, with a bit of imagination, could pass for a sunset… well, with a LOT of imagination. Of course, you can automate the times you want your lights or smart plugs to turn on, the behavior of the smart-buttons at different times of day so that pressing them turns on the lights at higher or lower intensity, etc. IMPORTANT: The Hue app has a major flaw when it comes to managing rooms and areas. If you integrate it with HomeKit, every time you add a new bulb you’ll get a prompt asking you to sync rooms with Apple’s Home app, and you MUST say NO, because if you say YES you’re doomed — it wipes out your Home app’s rooms and dumps all your devices into the default room! For instance, I’ve had to go around touching Aqara temperature sensors one by one to figure out which one was heating up so I could reassign it to the correct room. A total disaster. That said, if you ONLY use the Hue app without integrating it with HomeKit, everything works perfectly fine.

Aqara Smart Home or Xiaomi Home App

If all your devices belong to the Aqara ecosystem, you can manage them from either the Aqara Smart Home app or Xiaomi Home. Both are available for Android and iOS. Not sure if you knew this, but the Aqara brand belongs to Xiaomi — it’s simply their smart-home division — but all Aqara and Xiaomi devices are compatible and can be linked in either the Aqara app or the Xiaomi one. So, which one should we use? These days there’s honestly not much difference between the two, but keep in mind that once you start using one, you won’t be able to switch to the other without having to relink all your devices. I started out using the Aqara app, but it wouldn’t let me configure the bridge’s alarm. Well, it let me set it up in a very basic way, but some settings — like the activation delay to give you time to leave the house, the sound you want it to make, and so on — just weren’t configurable… so I migrated to Xiaomi Home for a bunch of years… though now I’ve gone back to Aqara because they’ve added the ability to integrate directly with HomeKit, without needing to log into the app or anything like that. I still need to look into how the bridge’s firmware updates work, but so far it seems useful and seamless. With the Xiaomi Home app I not only gained more customization, but it also has a small log where you can, for example, check whether an Aqara switch has been pressed, whether the door has opened, or the temperature the living room sensor recorded over the past month. Oh, and if you have any other Xiaomi device, like an electric scooter or the Vacuum robot, you can see everything from the same app and even automate some actions. But remember, this only applies to Aqara/Xiaomi devices — you can’t interact with devices outside the ecosystem, even though the latest bridges are Zigbee 3.0, which might give you the false idea that you could link any Zigbee 3.0 device to the ecosystem… nope, they simply communicate with the bridge using the standard, but that doesn’t mean external devices can be added to the Aqara/Xiaomi ecosystem.

Apple Home App

Unlike what happens with Philips and Aqara/Xiaomi, Apple doesn’t make its own devices (for now! rumor has it that could change in the future), but it does have the HomeKit standard, which lets you link any compatible device to the Apple Home app. There are plenty of devices officially sold by Apple on its website, and many others that carry the HomeKit sticker even though they’re not sold directly on the official site. When we have a device compatible with Apple HomeKit, we can set it up both from the manufacturer’s own app and from Home. But yes, you need both, since the initial setup has to be done through the manufacturer’s app… and often the ‘fine-tuned’ configuration is also only available in the manufacturer’s app, with only the basic functions integrated into Apple Home. This usually isn’t a problem though, since the benefits are much greater: we can automate actions across all our compatible devices. For example, if we have a Hue bulb (compatible with Apple HomeKit), an Eve temperature sensor (compatible with Apple HomeKit), and an Aqara switch (also compatible with Apple HomeKit), we can set it up so that pressing the switch turns on the bulb in blue tones if it’s going to be a very cold day, or in warmer red tones if it’s going to be an especially hot one… all automated and hands-off, of course. Also, for a few versions now, the Apple Home app integrates with Apple Shortcuts, so we can build automations with advanced conditions — requiring all of them to be met, or just any one of them, factoring in the iPhone’s location… pretty much anything you can think of… as long as you know how to build Shortcuts, of course, which isn’t always easy.

Home+ v5

And with that, we arrive at my favorite app, though I’ll warn you upfront: it’s not cheap. Home+ is like a Home app on steroids, giving us a ton of extra features and making life easier. With Home+ you no longer need to know programming or scripting to create complex automations, since the app itself makes it really simple and suggests connections and conditions as you go. It also lets us create device groups, so for example we can make a group of bedroom lights and just tell Siri ‘Hey Siri, turn on the bedroom lights,’ and it’ll turn on those lights without needing to create a specific scene — although of course we can still create scenes the same way we would from the Home app. Personally, I use Home+ as my main app; I only open the Home app now and then to try to debug some error or automation that’s not working as it should, and to check whether it’s showing up correctly in Home… but it’s not my go-to app. With the ‘Shortcuts’ integration, Home has gained a lot of flexibility, but Shortcuts are still pretty complicated to build, whereas with Home+ they come together in a much more natural way. If you own an Apple Watch and want to manage some of your Home devices through the native app, you’ll find they ALL show up in one huge, disorganized list. Finding the device you’re looking for can take a few seconds of scrolling up and down. With Home+ you can mark certain devices as ‘Favorites,’ and they’ll sync to your Apple Watch, giving you easy access to your most-used devices. The only downside I see (so to speak) is this: when you create an automation in Home, it automatically generates a scene that stays hidden. However, when you create an automation from another app like Home+, it generates a scene with a weird name that’s visible through the Home app. If you never open Home, it’s not an issue since you won’t see it, so if you manage everything through Home+ you won’t even notice — but if you happen to open Home for something, you’ll see a bunch of scenes with odd names, and personally, I don’t love that. This happens because Apple hides its own scenes by default to keep things tidy, but it doesn’t allow third-party apps to do the same. Lastly, Home+ lets you back up your devices and automations, so if you ever lose this data from your iCloud account (God forbid), you can easily recover it by restoring the backup. Hope this helped you a bit in deciding which app to use to manage all your connected devices!