Wednesday, June 14, 2023 9:43 amNo Comments

• How to

Apple’s redesigned Home app makes it easier to control all your smart home accessories — on all your Apple devices. It’s secure and protects your personal data. And with HomePod or Apple TV set up as the ultimate home hub, the new Home app unlocks the full potential of your smart home.

In iOS 17, coming this fall, the Home app adds the ability for users to view up to 30 days of activity history across door locks, garage doors, alarm systems, and contact sensors. Additionally, two popular HomeKit lock features — tap to unlock and PIN codes — are now available for Matter-compatible locks, providing even more ways to connect the home.

Wes Davis for The Verge:

Today, Apple Home’s advantages are mostly two-fold. First, there’s Apple’s easy-to-use, attractive Home app. I found Apple Home to be a breath of fresh air after using Amazon’s Alexa smart home app, which perplexingly hides most of its actual smart home controls in a tab.

Second is being so locked into the company’s ecosystem that you benefit from its strict requirements for Apple Home-compatible devices. Those requirements include the ability to control devices locally — which means you still get basic control from your phone if your internet service goes out — and features like HomeKit Secure Video (HKSV), which gives users encrypted cloud video storage and facial recognition based on users’ Apple Photos library, among other things…

Apple’s system has, among the big smart home platforms, also seen perhaps the most enthusiastic support for the new Matter protocol, which is partially based on Apple’s platform and still in its early days. If you’ve invested in almost any recent Apple Home Hub — that is, an Apple TV or a HomePod — you’ll find that device is also a Thread border router. That’s important because Thread is the wireless standard to be used in many inexpensive smart home devices going forward.

MacDailyNews Take: The full article, which explains how to build your smart home using Apple Home and which we recommend, is here. How to add a smart home accessory to the Home app, organize accessories by room and zone, and more here.

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