A friend of mine recently asked why I don't write more stories about Apple HomeKit. Any story, he said, seems to be about Alexa or Google Assistant and is far from basic. Amazon and Google are definitely stealing titles, especially when announcing partnerships thousands of brands or new voices from celebrities like John Legend or Samuel L. Jackson. But voice assistants are weak measures of a home's intelligence, no matter who it is.

The competition for the best smart home platform does not have a clear winner at the moment and each competitor has serious problems. But Apple's HomeKit platform has shown a vision of the smart home, which is distinctly different from that of Amazon and Google: it's a vision less concerned with capturing coverage and racing for tabletop real estate and more concerned with reliability and security.

In short, I am increasingly tempted by Apple.

Cut off the rotten pieces of Apple

Before we dedicate ourselves to why I think HomeKit is the best smart home platform, I want to point out the brightest issues with the Apple ecosystem. The first and foremost problem with HomeKit is the lack of a budget smart speaker, such as the $ 50 Echo Dot and Mini nest. Voice assistants are part of what makes smart devices so easy to use throughout the home, and a centralized smart speaker solves the problems that different family members who use Siri on their iPhone or don't have phones at all phones.

HomePod Apple is an undesirable $ 300, which makes HomeKit not attractive to households, where not everyone has an iPhone. And even if everyone has an iPhone, you still have to set up a common account, which (last time I tried) was a pain in the ass.

Another alleged problem for HomeKit is its closed-end partnership approach, which has left it with dozens of product integrations in Google and Thousands of Amazon. I will argue below, however, that this is a smaller problem than it seems at first.

Some people may be paying attention to Apple's reputation for making money from customers by changing their chargers and needing new dongles, artificially degrading its own hardware (probably to encourage people to upgrade) and simply charging exorbitant prices for its products. I share concerns about all these issues, but given Google and Amazon recent privacy records, I would say that Apple does not stand out as my only ethical year The wild west of an industry.

Finally, many people seem hated the idea of ​​using Siri to feed their smart home. Siri sounds more robotic than Google Assistant and Alexa, and Apple seems to have invested less resources in its voice assistant than its competitors. But Siri is doing exactly what many iPhone users want to do: the novelty of asking stupid questions has largely worn off, and most of us use voice assistants much more often to call a friend with their hands free or to play music. on a smart speaker than actually checking a conversation (which Google Assistant is definitely much better). In short, if you want a voice assistant to play music and control your smart home, Siri will do just as well as Google Assistant or Alexa. There It is a slight variation between the three, but not enough to prevent an ordinary person after a few weeks of use.

After I faced the deficiencies of HomeKit, what I think is the most convincing is the lack of a budget speaker to make the ecosystem accessible. It is not just a missing product; Apple seemed unwilling to make HomeKit home control more accessible. That refusal to keep up with competitors causes HomeKit customers to be nervous - that their platform might give up other innovations or that Apple's slow approach could discourage partnerships.

So any praise for a voice-focused HomeKit platform should come with that serious problem: It might work well for households with one person or for those for whom $ 300 is not a serious financial investment; for the rest of us, the entry barrier is badly raised.

But HomeKit also has a lot of under-recognized strengths, and these are the real reason why Apple's smart home ecosystem stands out from the others.

application

The Apple Home app has remained largely unchanged since its launch in 2016, but that's because it is very well designed. As soon as you open the app, you can add new devices, routines or new automation with one or two clicks and no scrolling. The app also offers easy access to your existing smart home - devices, routines and automations - to enable, edit and delete as you wish.

Instead, The Google Home app it remains filled with various icons, which often require three or four more unintentional taps to reach the desired destination. You can't even delete routines from the application; you can only edit them. In general, its use is felt in the best case and is confused in the worst case.

Finally, The Amazon Alexa app it seems to include smart home control almost as a later thought. You can add devices and routines easier than in the Google Home app, again with just a touch or two. But if you do not open the Alexa application regularly, you must refocus every time to use a clogged interface with other tools. It's not a bad app, per se, but it's out of focus, and it certainly doesn't empower you to explore the possibilities of a connected home like the Apple Home app does.

Daily use

The Home app can be the best of the bunch, but most people don't use the app much more than setting up their smart home for the first time. So let's look at how daily use works.

Scheduled routines, voice control and automation look very similar between the three big voice-based smart home platforms. You can program smart lights, for example, to switch off at certain times, to turn them off when you leave the house (using location tracking on your phone), and to tell the voice assistant about choosing to switch them on at any time. All of these features work in the same way on platforms, and while setting them up for the first time is easiest with HomeKit, there aren't too many differences once everything is in place.

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The biggest difference I found is consistency and reliability. At CNET Smart Home, my colleagues and I use HomeKit to control smart lights and shades more often than we use Google or Amazon - in fact, this remark inspired me to write this article first. Across all plans, we have all found the Apple ecosystem that works the way we want it to work, even as integrations on other platforms are struggling.

In part, this reliability is due to Apple's slow and stable approach to smart home space. When I covered Launching the Home app in 2016, I claimed that Apple remained behind the competition. And, to my frustration, the tech giant remains behind the curve in releasing a budget smart speaker. But this prudent approach, for all its problems, has avoided messy retcons as well Google's 2019 transition from Nest work to assistant work and forgotten devices as well Echo Tap portable speaker and Echo Look fashion room.

Even four years after launching the Home application, I can (and do) use integrations that I configured in the first week, either opening the shades and turning on the lights, or closing all the doors at the end of the day.

Friends with benefits

I noticed above that one of the biggest criticisms of HomeKit is that it integrates with only a few dozen brands. Instead, Google has partnerships with over 1,000 companies, and Amazon works with more than 10,000. Amazon seems to have the obvious upper hand in this case, but honestly, the vast majority of users will find the offers of the three technology giants more than enough to meet their needs.

What is more important to analyze is what categories of devices are covered. Apple - like Google and Amazon - offers connected smart lights, smart cameras, smart thermostats and smart fans. Basically, covering major brands from each major category of home connected devices will cover the needs of most people. There are a few exceptions: in particular, HomeKit does not work Wyze bulbs, which are our current favorites for their accessibility.

But for the novelty of each Kickstarter device or technology startup product brings an Amazon smart home, brings an equal measure of security risk. Many small companies, for example, cannot afford to pay a full-time security specialist, let alone a team. Moreover, flash-in-the-pan devices that lose support will not receive those automatic software updates that provide security bug fixes. In other words, by launching such a large partnership network, Google and, in particular, Amazon can open their customers to less secure devices.

On the other hand, Apple has sometimes made it difficult to associate with it because of its security requirements. For a while, it even asked companies to add MFi coprocessors to HomeKit devices - a measure he made in 2017.

Your network, as is conventional wisdom, is just as secure as the most insecure device. And Apple seems to prioritize this security more than Google or Amazon, especially given its recent expansion of router-based security features through Eero, a company owned by Amazon, all while Amazon is focusing on feature-centric features. convenience, such as "Wi-First Simple Setup. "And it's not just a partnership: Apple doubles on the security side by offering a new feature called HomeKit Secure Video, which encrypts and stores free security images on iCloud.

This focus on security and privacy is in stark contrast to the more problematic approaches of Google and Amazon.

But the best?

Apple's lack of a budget speaker is frustrating, by no means. But this problem aside, Apple's HomeKit platform is slowly positioning itself to be a compelling alternative to what may at times feel like a smart home match between an online search giant and an online retail giant.

Is Apple the best platform right now? It's questionable. But it is close enough to the competition that it could only benefit from this distinction with a few clever changes.

Update, February 28: Other comments were added.