Amber Neely
Apple released iOS 16 earlier this fall, and with it, launched an improved version of the Home app with the goal of making it work for everyone.
The new Home app — once prone to being unruly if a user's home had more than a handful of smart devices — has been redesigned with a focus on simplicity.
Cecelia Dantas, who has worked in Product Marketing at Apple for nearly a decade, pulls back the curtain on the overhauled Home app in an interview with Parade, spotted by 9to5Mac.
"We took the opportunity to rethink and redesign the Home app," Dantas says. "It has this fresh new look and it scales beautifully, even for those who are just starting out their smart home with a few accessories or for those who have an advanced setup."
The new Home tab is highly customizable, allowing users to create the ideal "mission control" for their smart home. Every device, control, sensor, and room shows up in the Home tab. It is broken down into different sections, starting with Favorites, Cameras, and Scenes, followed by a section for each room.
If that feels too cluttered, users can hide devices they don't need to see regularly.
Dantas also takes a moment to speak on Matter, explaining how it would work with existing Apple privacy features.
"[Apple] continues to apply the same lens for privacy that we do across all of our products and services. So all the data is stored using end-to-end encryption," she explains. "So there's no way for Apple to read this data. And Apple doesn't build a profile around what accessories you use, or how you use them."
Matter is a new smart home standard that will work with nearly all smart home ecosystems with a single certification rather than requiring manufacturers to get individual certifications for Google, Amazon, and Apple.
While great in theory, Matter is still in the early stages and won't mean a lot for Homekit users out of the gate.
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9 Comments
Hoping that Lights button at the top will enable me to turn everything off for Halloween. We’re going out and don’t want yard and porch lights on to disappoint trick or treaters. Normally, all come on at sunset.
It's very nice that they redesigned the home app, and it really is much better. Now, if only it would work... Automations have gone bust with iOS 16, it really is a big mess, as you can see in many threads in the community. It really shows that this has never been tested properly as it is not a little "once in a while" bug but essentially makes austomations unusable,
The Home app is certainly attractive with all of the background pictures. Functionally it’s still very far behind Alexa app, which incidentally has a prominent control to turn ON/OFF all lights - which I used last night. It also lets you classify smart plugs that are controlling lights as “lights,” which I find rather useful since the smart plug is just an intermediary or proxy.
Apple will get there eventually. I think they are trying to make it very simple and accessible for those who are new to home automation. Perhaps when they start getting more people comfortable with it they’ll add in the kind of features people who have been using home automation devices are expecting. It’s still very early in the adoption phase for this technology for a lot of Apple users.