The most exciting HomeKit news from WWDC 2017

Apple held their annual developer conference (WWDC) last week. Whilst there wasn’t a huge amount of HomeKit news in the main keynote, the separate “What’s new in HomeKit” session is where the interesting stuff was announced.

Improved event triggers

One of my biggest gripes with HomeKit was the lack of any slightly advanced event triggers. With the upcoming iOS11 update, there’s a lot more scope for the way that events are triggered including:

• Conditional triggers: i.e. if I arrive home and it’s after sunset.
• Absolute date and time events: i.e. 9pm on June 12th.
• Relative time offset: i.e 1 hour before sunrise, 16minutes after sunset.
• Thresholds and ranges: i.e if the temperature is higher than 20° and lower than 25°, or if the temperature is less than 18°.
• Multi-user geolocation: i.e the first user to come home or when there are no users at home.
• End events; triggering a duration after an event is triggered. i.e after a contact sensor is triggered, turn a light on, and then off automatically after 5 minutes.
• Execute once

These should greatly help to improve the way that scenes work and help to plug some of the gaps with the current implementation.

Software Authentication

This is actually pretty huge and a fundamental shift in the way that Apple embraces the hobbyist. Up until now, you had to apple for an MFI licence in order to view the HomeKit spec (HAP) and develop HomeKit compliant products. HomeBridge is an open source, reverse engineered way of unofficially adding non compliant products to HomeKit. The fear was always that Apple would someday shut this down, but they instead seem to be taking a keen interest in how the hacker community and hobbyists are using the platform. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the functionality from HomeBridge plugins, making their way into the stock platform.

With this comes the ability for bedroom tinkerers to make their own HomeKit accessories using a RaspberryPi or Arduino (as long as they’re not put up for commercial sale). Apple doesn’t specify what (if any) commercial products will be allowed to bypass the MFI chip and use a software only authentication model, but my guess is that things such as Wemo switches and bulbs may be the ideal candidate. Things that grant access to the home (cameras, locks etc), will still require the MFI chip and certification.

HomePod

Finally the HomePod speaker; a premium device aimed at serious audiophiles. For HomeKit apart from the obvious, the interesting thing here is that the speaker also doubles as a HomeKit hub, not only allowing remote access and automations but also addressing an issue with the bluetooth range of some HomeKit enabled devices (if you have enough of them dotted around the house).

To see the video from the session, head over to the Apple Developer Portal.