By Joe Rosensteel

January 17, 2023 5:21 PM PT

How many Home updates does it take to turn off a light bulb?

At some point, when I was reconstructing the automation that turns on and off the floor lamp in my living room for the third or fourth time, it dawned on me that I was sold a bill of goods regarding HomeKit.

I had set the bar for HomeKit so low: It just needed to turn on a switch at a time of day, and turn off the switch at another time of day. Even that stopped working, and here I was trying to coax it, to massage it, to just tell me what I could do to fix it. Pleading with the invisible force that controls my home to just give me an error message, to show a notification, anything at all.

That was how I closed out my relationship with Apple’s Home app, and HomeKit, in December of 2022. I hadn’t even upgraded to the new Home architecture that was breaking other people’s home setups. No, I was too smart to ever do anything like that, but I was unprotected from whatever piece of code of was introduced to iOS, or tvOS, that borked some but not all of my Home automation in December. Whatever “we did it guys, we hit our 2023 roadmap target, let’s pack up for Christmas” software release that was put out into the world messed things up.

Last week, my two Apple TVs updated to the latest tvOS update available and then the automation for the floor lamp started working again. Why? I don’t know. Was the code fixed? Was it just because the Apple TV devices restarted and reshuffled something completely intangible? I’ll never really know.

Fixes for Home, and HomeKit, are always just around the corner too. Not in a “this thing that works great is getting more stuff” way but in a “this thing that doesn’t work as advertised will work a little more like it’s advertised, maybe” way.

We’re coming up on nine years of this. For all that time we’ve been suckered into thinking that some future software update, a bit of firmware, a new device with new radios would somehow fix what ails our abodes. There’s not much to show for it other than broken promises and haunted electronics.

We don’t have a full grasp on how large or small problems are, because all we ever have to rely on is anecdotal statements from all the other suckers using this stuff. When something breaks for me, I can ask around—but unless someone somehow has my exact combination of devices, then nobody has an answer. I can’t take my home (or its constituent bits) into the Apple Store. There’s no error reporting, so I can never tell if something is failing because of a third-party device, Apple, my network, or all of the above.

In 2022 we were promised that new Home app—which we unfortunately got. And we were promised that new Home Architecture with Matter support—which some people also briefly had.

Design is my passion

The Home app in iOS 16, in my opinion, didn’t make the Home app any more of a joy to use. I was withholding judgement for the first few point releases out of the hope that maybe there were parts of it that were in flux. Several months later, I think I can safely say that no one at Apple seems to see the problems I’m seeing.

First, and foremost, the buttons for devices are actually two buttons. The other buttons that are not for devices—like the pill-shaped ones at the top, or the buttons for Scenes, which look exactly like the buttons for devices, are just one button.

But not the buttons for devices. So for months, I was tapping on the largest part of the button by area, which was the text next to the icon. And every time, I’d be annoyed when a drawer interface would come up to show me a cartoonishly large switch as the interface for controlling smart switches around my home. You couldn’t tap the cartoon switch, you had to slide the cartoon switch up or down to make it switch the device on or off as if it was a physical control. Did Scott Forstall sneak back into the building?

Little did I know that what I needed to do was tap on the smaller, circular icon inside the button. That icon is its own button (not just an icon, like it is for Scenes), and it will turn the switch on and off with just a tap.

What school of interface design are we sending people to these days where a rounded rectangle has a circle inside it and it’s supposed to be obvious that they do different things when you tap on them instead of just being a single button with an icon?

Furthermore, that slide-to-switch thing is fundamentally a useless attempt to impose some kind of physical action on something that is entirely digital. It also has nothing to do with the physical design of my smart switch—which has a single physical button. It’s attempting to be something that doesn’t exist.

It gets even more absurd when we get into the world of dimmable smart bulbs. Instead of an enormous switch, there’s a sliding, vertically oriented bar. The lower portion is the light color, and the height of the bar within the element indicates its level of illumination. In the top corner there’s text to tell you the percentage of “Brightness”. If you want 0% or 100% then it’s easy to slide that bar all the way up or all the way down. If you want a specific value inside of that range then you need slowly drag the bar with a finger until the text at the top reads the value you want and then release your finger carefully like you’re defusing the pressure plate on a bomb. Any small movement you make as part of releasing the surface, and your digit will change it by a digit.

This might sound like a silly problem, because analog sliders don’t even tell you percentages when you’re moving them, but if I have multiple lights that I want to match to a specific intensity with my digital computer device, then I should be able to be digitally accurate and precise by entering a value. This is particularly important if I’m setting up an automation so that lights hit a certain luminance at a certain time of day.

Automation mess

The state of automation in the Home app is just as bad as it was before. The Automation tab features row after row of unsortable automations that by default are named after the trigger (typically a time of day) and either a single device name or a number for the total number of devices using it. You can go to each device, scroll down (or tap the gear) and see the automations on a device, but to just look at your automation list from the Automation tab you can’t easily tell what’s going on. Particularly if you have a lot of automations, or if you have automations for older, or seasonally used, devices.

There also isn’t a concept for transitions, or animation. For decades we’ve had science fiction where when someone enters a room, or says a command, lights fade up, or off in a pleasing way. While we should also be able to instantly turn on lights, there’s plenty of room for romance here. If it starts to get darker in my office around 2 PM, and I want to fade up the lights to around 25%, and then fade up to 100% by 6 PM, then it should be something I can do without creating individual automations every X minutes to have it sharply snap to a new percentage immediately.

Apple does offer Adaptive Lighting, which changes the color temperature of the light (how warm or cool the light is) over time based on assumptions about cooler light in the day time, and warmer light in the morning and at night. (It has nothing to do with the actual color temperature of the light in the room, like True Tone, because there are no devices measuring anything.) Also, the perceived saturation of the light can be different based on the intensity of the light. Apple doesn’t change the intensity of the light at all, only the temperature. It makes it a little weird.

In the Nanoleaf lighting app, I can do fun stuff like set up a variety of tasteless pulsing animations to roll through, or just, like, vibe out, man. Apple doesn’t understand or communicate with my devices in that way at all.

Lumped together

With Scenes, HomeKit can be commanded to perform action across multiple accessories all at once. It’s a nice idea, but unfortunately it’s inconsistent—since Scenes aren’t devices, they don’t behave like devices in some important ways.

I have a Scene called “Christmas” that turns on the switch for my Christmas tree, and a separate switch for my garland lights. I can tell Siri, “Turn on Christmas” and the tree and garland will light up. However, I can’t tell Siri to turn off Christmas. I can only tell Siri to turn off each named switch. I can, however, tap the button for the Scene “Christmas” on and off as much as I would like. (Or at least until my old iHome switch crashed, and then the scene’s label just said “Christmas Failed.”)

How is it that scenes can have a binary on and off state in the interface, but Siri can’t address that?

Ghosts of Christmas lights past

If I have a smart switch for my Christmas tree, and a smart switch for my garland, I only use them when I have my Christmas tree and garland out. As you might imagine, that is not much of the calendar year. I can either have them show as offline for 11 months, remove them from the Home completely, or disable their appearance in the Home app’s Home View. If I do that last thing, they still show as offline, but only in the view of the specific room. It bothers me that there’s no way to say “yes, this is offline on purpose because” but at least you don’t have to look at the error.

It’s not immediately obvious that you can do these things because you have to go into the settings for each device and figure out that if you remove it from the Home View that you’ll still be able to find it again in the Living Room view next year.

Here’s a little life hack that listeners to this week’s Upgrade already know: You can make a little birdhouse in your soul, a fictitious room named something like “Offline” or “Deactivated” or “Panic Room” or “Oubliette”, and move all the devices in there. Why not? I’m fancy enough to deserve an oubliette.

You can also remove Scenes from the Home view, but you might also have to long-press on the Scene to select “Hide Suggested Scenes” because the Scene you removed from the Home View might still be suggested. What a time to be alive.

Scenes aren’t assigned a Room, they exist in the UI as an element in any Room that includes a device that the Scene controls. So if you move your Christmas devices to “Offline” the Scene will move too, and back again, if you put it back in the Living Room, or whatever.

The money pit

I’ve spent a long time kvetching about turning lights on and off and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the smart home mess. I didn’t get into sensors, the Home Hub shuffle of your Home Hub devices turning on or off, or HomeKit Secure Video (but what’s the rush, it hasn’t changed since it was launched!)

What I’m saying is, I need to be honest with myself. That future software update, that bit of firmware that will fix everything isn’t coming. Even when Apple fixes whatever was wrong with its flawed Home architecture revamp, it can’t counteract the weight of all its years of bad choices. Especially not when it seems to keep making new ones, too.