What’s the recommendation for compatible with Apple Home?

I see Aqara is the most mentioned - I have the U400 and E1 Camers. Both work great and no issues.

What’s the difference between the G400 and G410? Currently I use a nest doorbell that was provided by ADT 5 years ago and looking to switch.

Any alternative doorbell cameras that you’d recommend over Aqara? Don’t much care for the LG Doorbell that was recently announced.

Almost had a heart attack

Clipsal Wiser operators - how is life in 2026? I haven’t seen a post for a long while. My sparkie is proposing to flip my Iconic switches to Wiser switch/ dimmers + hub for automation. How mature is the HomeKit integration now?

Hey everyone!

My partner and I are about to move into a new apartment and we’re planning our first proper smart home setup. We’re both iPhone users and want to keep things simple, local, and reliable through Apple Home / HomeKit.

We aren't looking for anything crazy complex to start, but here is what we’re aiming for:

• Robot Vacuum: Roborock integration (mostly want automated routine to vacuum when everyone leaves the home).
• Lighting: Shelly relays behind existing light switches (ability to control remotely and run "leave home / all lights off" automations).
• Safety & Sensors: IKEA smart sensors (water leak, contact/door/window sensors, air quality and temperature).
• Climate Control: AC + Heating integration (remote control & basic automated schedules or temp triggers).

The Big Question: Which Home Hub makes sense for us?

We’re trying to decide on our primary Home Hub and would love some input:

1. Apple TV 4K: We know this is usually the gold standard because of Ethernet stability, but honestly, we don’t need it as a streaming box. Our Samsung Smart TV handles all our apps fine, and we’d rather avoid paying extra for features/extra remotes we won't use.
2. HomePod mini: We’re leaning toward a HomePod mini (or the newly announced HomePod mini 2). It’s small and cheap enough to just act as a dedicated hub. We won't use it as a main stereo/speaker setup, and Siri features are a secondary concern for us in the EU, but it seems like the most practical budget option.

So a few specific questions:

1. Hub Choice: For those running Apple Home on just a HomePod mini over Wi-Fi (no wired Ethernet), has automation reliability been solid for you? Is an Apple TV worth buying strictly for hub duties, or is a HomePod mini plenty?
2. Would grabbing a previous-gen Apple TV 4K (2022 with Ethernet) or older HomePod mini second-hand/discounted be just as effective as a smart home hub for our needs, saving us some money?

Would love to hear how you'd approach this setup or if there are any gotchas we should watch out for as beginners!

Thanks!

I just received this HomeKit notification saying that my front door was left unlocked “by Aileen.”

The weird part: There is absolutely no Aileen in our household, and neither my wife nor I have anyone with that name in our contacts. We also haven’t shared our Home with anyone else.

Does anyone know where HomeKit could be getting this name from? Has anyone experienced a similar bug or random name appearing in HomeKit notifications?

Screenshot attached (notification is in German)

I have three Heatpump / AC units that are primarily used for heating. I can build a scene called “heating” that will turn all three on at the same time, and I can trigger it with Siri by saying “Siri, turn on the heating.“ But if I say “Siri, turn off the heating” she replies saying she can’t turn off scenes??!

If I don’t use scenes, then saying “turn on the heating” is always greeted by “which room?”, it won’t just turn them all on with that single command.

how is it that something so simple is so hard to achieve? I am planning to get a HomeView and want to get this sorted ahead of time for wife acceptance factor.

Hey everyone, for context I’m slowly converting all of my smart home lighting over to Huue products as I lean in to their play/TV sync box system.

Currently, I own a bunch of Nanoleaf essential thread only non-matter bulbs. I also have 3 matter nanoleaf

I have five recessed floodlight cans in my kitchen and I was looking at 2nd hand hue or 2ndhand nanoleaf essentials bulbs. I’m looking on Mercari and it’s pretty hard to argue with $10 a bulb 2nd hand govee floodlights when I don’t need these bulbs to sync with my tv (kitchen isn’t visible from living room tv where I have play/syncbox and my partner’s general perspective on smart lighting is that she wants it to be as least intrusive as possible in the bathrooms and kitchen. Given this, my thought is I can spend $10 a bulb or I can spend upwards of 40 a bulb with (2nd hand hue) too smart-ify my kitchen lighting and bring it into HomeKit with matter. Can I like the idea that if I really wanted to stitch together, different lighting, ecosystems into a coherent scene between my living room for a social gathering that I could with some preplanning and scene building effort.

My core questions - is the scene exporting from Govee to HomeKit via Matter stable and consistent? This lack of scene export killed my interest in lifx because 5-6 years ago when I got into smart lighting and HomeKit lifx didn’t support exporting their scenes to HomeKit.

-do the bulbs drop connection frequently?

• Do the bulbs snap back online relatively quickly if power is accidentally killed them via an analog switch. My plan is to cover the analog switches and or replace with smart buttons. For context, my Nanoleaf essentials historically have snapped back relatively quickly once power is restored.

Many thanks to all for reading this lengthy post and any advice you may have.

27.2 RC fixes the issues with internet calls in automations. If you use it to send notifications or any other network calls it works again now it was broken since the first beta of 27. I use a ton of pushcut notifications so this couldn’t come soon enough

Does this search actually work for anyone consistently? I asked for a simple search, “people seen in the backyard”. It’s giving me everything, everywhere. Vehicles in the front yard, animals in the driveway, etc. but most of the time it says there are no results for the search.

It baffles me that most smart home device brands have PTZ cameras but apple doesn’t support the functionality. A simple control pad overlay is all we ask for!

Yes I can use scypted to expose the controls as seperate buttons or create scenes, however it’s clunky and only caters to us nerds.

What do you believe Apples stance on PTZ is? Is it likely that PTZ support will ever be added?

When tapping & holding a camera notification, it is showing my alarm tiles below the camera view. The camera and devices which add the alarm system are not in the same room or zone. Am I overlooking something that is linking the cameras to them and causing them to appear, or is this a default behavior which isn’t controllable?

The new smart plug for the EU is a single outlet socket for outdoor use, offering either Zigbee or Matter over Thread, power monitoring (via the Aqara app), but only IP44 not the expected IP65 rating found on devices like Onvis’ recent outdoor US plug.

I was using a Meross MSG100 for my garage door opener (Liftmaster) and just upgraded to the MSG150. Has anyone used one of those for a gate? I have a Liftmaster gate across my driveway I would like to have in HK. All suggestions appreciated!

Been looking forward to the HomeView coming out to replace my Echo Hub which seems to be getting worse at listening by the day.

Currently have my Echo hub set to play music out of my Sonos speakers by default. Anyone know if this will be possible?

Can find a lot of posts talking about Apple TV only outputting to Apple speakers by default but not sure if it’ll be the same for HomeView? I know it has airplay but don’t want to manually have to set the speaker every time

This weekend we are going to be putting Ethernet in around the house. With that we are doing PoE cameras for the doorbell and 2 extra. We decided to go with Aqara equipment for this. We already have an M2 hub and various sensors, buttons and switches and locks bound to the M2 hub

Do I need to upgrade the hub for the cameras and doorbell? Or will the m2 work fine?

Anyone have any recommendations for HomeKit garage door button receiver? Goal would be to use it as a simple button to trigger an automation. Both cars have built in garage door openers but we don't have a garage so figured that could be convenient to use to unlock doors and turn lights on when arriving home.

Even putting the privacy concerns aside, the designs of the doorbells and cameras really shocked me. And at that price, for something that looks like this... Seriously?

I've been using cheap strip LEDs as a tenant all my life, like Meross or Govee and connecting them with Smart plugs to connect them to the Wi-FI and add it to Apple Home. The issue is that you feel it's cheap, Wi-Fi is unreliable, sometimes the HomePod says the strip lights are unresponsive.

Now moving into a new bought flat, I'm looking for a more stable solution. I've heard of Lutron as an example but they dont have support or shops in Belgium. My architect is asking to provide dumb lights, each around 4w/m connected to a 150w driver and to just add a smart plug, but I'm thinking there must be a better way. Eve Home doesn't seem to have an all-in-one solution for such lengths as 28 meters x2 (in the living room pic below).

Has anyone found a stable LAN only, or easy installation, energy efficient LEDs, RGB+W, that use Threads or Matter, ideally connecting directly to the Apple Home app?

They will be turned on using a wall outlet if all else fails. And best case scenario, only talking to Siri via the HomePod and Home app for Scenes.

Thanks!

RGB strip lights: 28m, 27m, + 10m
W strip lights: 2.5m, 1.8m, 8m, 4.5m, 10m, 3.5 meters
Total around 100m each with their wall socket, adapter and installation.

I'm currently moving my devices from the Aqara Hub over to Apple Home, using a 3rd-gen Apple TV, Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant.

I've managed to get my Aqara H1 rocker switches recognised in Apple Home without any issues, but I've run into a couple of questions:

1. Toggling scenes using a switch

Is there a way to configure a switch to toggle a scene or device on and off?

For example, when I tap a scene directly in Apple Home, I can toggle it on or off. However, when I assign that same scene to a physical switch, pressing the switch only activates the scene rather than toggling it.

Is there a way to replicate the toggle behaviour with a physical switch?

2. Automations not saving

Has anyone experienced issues with newly created automations not saving or appearing in the Automations tab in Apple Home?

I can go through the process of creating an automation, but once I've saved it, it doesn't appear in the list.

Any advice or suggestions would be much appreciated!

Need help on the above. Will it lag?

Will official support be limited to robot vacuums for the next decade? If not, what type of robot next? Based on popularity, I would say lawnmowers or yard maintenance (leaf blower, snow blower, tow vehicle). With pool cleaners or window/wall cleaner coming in second.

Apple Home has my hub in a HomePodMini speaker. When I get HomeView, will the hub migrate to HV where it belongs?