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.…