The opening keynote of Apple’S WWDC highlighted several big updates to the firm’s software platforms, including its HomeKit home automation offering.
OS X is being rebranded to macOS with the first release of the newly-named OS being Sierra. But, perhaps the biggest announcement came in its breakdown the upcoming iOS 10.
HomeKit, Apple’s framework for home automation, was launched with iOS 8 in 2014. It allowed smart devices including lights, door locks, and window shades to be controlled with an iPhone. Product developers scrambled to get their devices HomeKit compliant, creating apps that utilized the framework to make controlling smart home devices easy.
Unfortunately, this meant that if you had a smart home filled with these devices, you were likely to need a bunch of different apps to control it. Need to turn off the lights and draw the shades? You would need to switch between two different apps to do so.
HomeKit now handles multiple commands at once
With iOS 10, users will have access to a new app that ties this all together. Home enables you to not only control these various HomeKit-compliant devices from a single app, but to set up scenes that execute multiple commands simultaneously.
Additionally, it brings that device control to Apple Watch and iPad. So, the producers of these devices can now focus more on creating great hardware and less on building a variety of iOS and watchOS apps to make it possible to control them.
Brands like Philips have been taking advantage of HomeKit since early on and new products are being developed every day, creating a rich and competitive smart home market.
This is just another step towards what Apple is hoping will be a mass adoption of smart home solutions. Electric garage door openers and thermostats being just the beginning, soon Apple hopes that everyone will be dimming lights and locking their front door from their Apple device.
