07/06/2022
WWDC just over, Apple detailed some updates and new features announced for all the devices across Apple’s ecosystem of products and services, a major HomeKit update has been announced.
Here are all the details about the latest and greatest HomeKit and Home app features.
Home app has been redesign, Unlike the current home app, where Scenes & sensors are located at the top, and cameras are shown at the bottom, with regular-sized tiles to represent individual devices, now all sections can be moved to preferred locations on the screen. Not only that, just as is the case with Widgets on your iPhone Home Screen, where you can set different-sized tiles, you can now do the same with individual HomeKit devices. The Home app can highlight security devices such as door locks over lighting, and rooms are now grouped in-line on the app’s home screen instead of having a separate tab. For camera, he new Home app will provide a single tile that can display up to four Homekit camera at once in a grid view. If you have more than four cameras, you can access them with just a swipe, so you can always check in quickly.
Furthermore, when it comes to cameras and their snapshots, instead of individual screens, you can combine four feeds in one larger widget.
The section on HomeKit, which was in many ways fairly perfunctory, started by reiterating the main talking points of Matter – the forthcoming Smart Home standard – that were pretty much covered last year.
This would suggest that any larger changes to the HomeKit landscape will only come once Matter starts rolling out. Without a doubt, there are going to be more changes within the new HomeKit app, if the new icons spotted in the short presentation are anything to go by.
Despite several setbacks that have pushed the rollout of the Matter smart home standard beyond its initial timeframe, Apple shared a brief update at this year's WWDC. As usual, Apple touted the workgroup as the smart home's future, with Apple's HomeKit serving as a foundation of the new standard.
According to Apple, there are currently 130 Matter-enabled products in the works. Devices from vendors such as Google, Amazon, Schlage, Eve, Philips Hue, and August will be hitting the market "later this year".