I love Apple Home. It has its flaws, but— just like Lemmy— I love trying out bleeding-edge tech like Thread, Matter, mesh based routers and sick lighting. I also mess around with Homebridge, and I’ve considered trying Home Assistant. I’ve learned a lot, and I want to collaborate with other home automation enthusiasts. I’m going to try to post more to that community, but I wanted to put this out there if anyone is interested in collaborating with me to build up that community.
Ok, if you have Home Assistant, what does Homekit do for you? I really don’t know because I don’t own any Apple products, and all of my home automation is either completely home brew, or Home Assistant.
The wife and family have no idea what’s going on behind the curtain. They open their phone and they see and have access to exactly what I want them to see. They can tell Siri to do things. They don’t have to install some weird app. They aren’t talking to some home brew esp32 that kinda works. It’s built in and just works… if we had android id expose the same stuff to google home.
I think a lot of people like that it’s a preinstalled app on their phone. And especially now that they have guest mode. You can impress people that have iPhones and literally know nothing about smart homes by saying “hey check the home app on your phone, I just gave you guest access”.
In practice, I’ve never actually used guest mode, but I think it is a cool selling point.