So I have been wanting to get into home automation for a while. As someone with great enthusiasm for all things tech and mostly all things Apple. The Home app on my iPhone was one app I did not care about, in fact I had it deleted from my list of apps, and every WWDC when Apple will tout about its new features for the Home is when I’d take a bathroom break.
I had been eyeing some Philips Hue bulbs but they are expensive to get into. A week ago I was on HotUkDeals and saw a pair of Philips Hue bulbs with the Hue bridge for £49.99. Lets than 50 quid this was the moment to get into home automation.
I get the bulbs and I follow the instructions and everything works out of the box. I download the Hue app and everything is smooth sailing at this point. Then I download the Home app (I wasn’t lying when I told you I had it deleted) and I set it up to work with my new bulbs, amazing. I can tell Siri to turn off the lights when I am in bed and can’t be bothered to get up to turn them off, you know like how I used to do the past 30 or so years.
Now come’s the first annoyance. I live in a rented flat, so I can’t be messing around with my electrical switches. If the switch itself is in the “off” position I can’t do much. But this annoyance is something I was already aware of, so no great harm done. After all the bulb acts like a traditional bulb and will turn itself on if I turn on the switch, then I can use all the automation to my hearts content.
The next annoyance was something major. I live with my wife, so wanted to set this up on her phone too. So I grab her phone, install the Hue app (she already had the Home app installed — like a normal person), I created another Hue account for her and she could control the bulbs from the app and it worked fine. But the Home app would not connect to the Hue Bridge, I did some quick googling and some suggestions were to use the same account on both phones. So I logout of her account on the Hue app and log back in using my account… and I run into the same problem. This is when I run out of patience and try hitting the “I need help” button on the Hue App (in retrospect this is the first thing I should have done) and I am greeted with the below screen, with instructions in plain English that someone in primary school will understand:
So now I open the Home app on my iPhone and invite her, the invite notification pops up on her phone but says something along the lines of “the person who sent you this need to upgrade to the new home app”. What? I just downloaded the app on my phone!
I do a bit of googling, figure out there was an “upgrade” to a newer architecture in how Apple handles the “home”. I don’t read much into it and go ahead with the upgrade on the app, it gives me a warning about not being able to use my iPad, like everyone else I skip over the warning and upgrade to the newer architecture. Once done, the whole invite people option is missing. Even more annoyed I google the issue and turns out on the newer architecture only Apple TVs or HomePods can be set as the “Owner” of the home. Apple calls this the Home Hub.
So there goes that plan of setting this thing on my wife’s phone. She does have the Hue app from where she can control the bulbs, I am going to setup some shortcuts for her to use the lights with Siri (you get this for free if you can set this up on the home app, but now i’ll have to manually create the automation in the Shortcuts app). This also means she does not have the below options on her Control Centre:
The other annoyance was on my Apple Watch. I would tell Siri on my Watch to turn off the lights and Siri would say something went wrong and do nothing, this happens intermittently and I am miffed every time this happens. Once I open the Home app on the Watch and then control it from the app or ask Siri to, it just works fine. Annoying, yes but i’ll live with it for now, perhaps do some further research on what the issue might be.
So now I have home automation setup on my iPhone, iPad and the MacBook, and just the Hue app on my wife’s phone. I am thinking of buying a HomePod Mini just so we can have the Home app running on her phone too. I was told Home Automation was an expensive hobby, now I know why.
