IOS 18 Makes It Much Easier to Use Smart Devices With Apple Home
It’s been at least a decade since choosing an operating system was a real concern when purchasing specific software or hardware, but smart technology has been slow to catch up. In recent years, it has been much more common to find that many devices work with Android, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa, but not Apple Home. If you wanted to control the light bulbs using an Android phone without any additional hardware, you could probably do it, but iPhone users are out of luck.
iOS 18, released earlier this week, changes things for the better.
Matter improved the situation, but integration with Apple was still a problem
In some context, Apple Home refers to Apple’s entire smart home ecosystem as a whole, and is also the name of the smart home app for your iPhone. Apple HomeKit is the core technology of Apple Home, Siri is the voice assistant that these devices use, and Apple offers devices like the HomePod as smart home hubs.
Things started to improve two years ago with the introduction of Matter and Thread, two industry-wide protocols for connecting smart devices. Devices with the new standards helped solve the exclusivity issue because they could work with any Matter-compatible hub, and through that hub, with the Apple Home app on your phone. As more companies signed up to the Matter standard, the devices they produced became compatible with home devices. The only catch was that these devices still required a hub (HomePod and Apple TV 4K are compatible with Matter).
This is ironic because the goal of Matter was to free people from having to have a bunch of separate nodes. Even if you only need one , that means you’ll have to use additional hardware for updates and maintenance, and it’s an extra step to connect the device to the hub. In most cases, Google Home and Android Alexa users did not encounter such difficulties – they could often simply connect the devices to their digital assistants.
iOS 18 finally makes Apple more compatible with Matter (and Thread)
It got easier this week. Apple released iOS 18 , and with it the ability to break free from those hubs and connect the Home app directly to any Matter device, as long as your iPhone is running iOS 18 . The same connectivity options apply to Thread devices if you have an iPhone 15 or later, as these devices have a built-in Thread radio. So again, if you just want to turn Matter bulbs on and off without any drama, you can now do it on your iPhone.
However, there are still compelling arguments for having a hub. A direct connection to your phone frees you from cluttered home equipment, while hubs enable integration between devices for powerful automation. If you want these bulbs to only light up when a sensor is triggered, or to have the bulbs detect whether the curtains are up or down, you’ll still need a hub for that. If you’re not ready to commit to an entire home system and just need one or two devices, connecting them directly to your iPhone is now a simple process.