Home Kit

I had read a forum post in June about home kit development and the guys at roomie thinking it was a completely natural fit. Just wondering if there was any more to share at this point, as it's CES time, when a number of other platforms will be announcing their home automation gear and tie ins to platforms such as homekit.

The first actual HomeKit devices are getting announced now, doesn't mean they're shipping. We're evaluating when we can actually test against live devices to provide a useful feature. Until devices are actually shipping, useful, and talk to HomeKit, there's not much to be done with software. We're still intending to add it when it will have a purpose.

Thank you.

I think one of the only things left i would like to see in roomie would be not only home kit devices integrated when they ship, but a roomie device that can get homekit certification.

I really think the reason roomie could excel is whenever i look at homekit its always lights, locks, lamps, thermostats, things in our home we use. But what about tv's? Avr's? Cable boxes?

This is where i see the greatest fit for roomie in homekit. I dont want to just say siri turn on the light, or turn up the heat, i want to say siri watch a movie and be able to do so much more.

They are shipping now.

I assumed you guys were going to go with a bridging solution; something that creates custom rooms with custom commands, to be able to fire off home automation. I would love to keep everything directly through roomie.

any updates on this? Please let me know if it's not appropriate to bump this, but considering homekit devices have been shipping, i was wondering if there were any plans you could share about where roomie is going with this.

thanks!

HomeKit has the same priority as any other device. That means user demand dictates the prioritization. We can't name a single compelling and shipping HomeKit device at the moment, and we have had 0 specific requests for anything controlled by HomeKit, so to date it does not have any priority. This is not anything wrong with HomeKit, the proprietary encryption chips for it just started shipping weeks ago so it's completely normal that devices are not ready, it's rather that the timeline for it just wasn't anything like what people originally imagined when it was introduced with iOS 8.

In reality as we can see now, it's more like CarPlay, a multi-year vision that will eventually have a ton of support, but that is a fairly distant future, at best Q4'15, more likely mid-2016. For Roomie, we prioritize HomeKit not based on HomeKit itself, but rather on the devices that require HomeKit for control and cannot be controlled better without it. A good way to promote HomeKit prioritization is to ask for the target device you want to control with HomeKit rather than simply HomeKit.

Thank you.

Now that some moore homekit devices are starting to show up I am wondering if it will be possible to control Lutron Caseta thru siri/roomie integration or will that require the latest ( version2) pro hub? Same question on ecobee 3 thermostat.

Additionally I think it would be awesome if Siri could be used to launch activities we have set up within roomie. e.g. "watch TV in family room ". I am not sure if that is a homekit item or a siri item.

by supporting HomeKit you could potentially take out multiple birds with one stone. Homekit would cover ecobee 3, the new Insteon hub, the new Lurton hub, and the upcoming Phillips hue hub. It would also support all future HomeKit devices as they come out... Supporting HomeKit and googles version of HomeKit might be the way to go with home automation... Because your app would already be able to control supported devices as they come out.

I would also like to point out something in iOS 9 that makes roomie even more awesome... "Open in place"... If you use an app link for example "remot://". It now opens the apple remote app on top of roomie and gives you a link on top of the apple remote app to return to roomie... Witch it does very fast because roomie is still running under it.... Now if only you could implement a way to open apps from within roomie that don't have a url schema.... This could be very powerful... I almost wonder if apple added an API for opening apps... I will have to look in to it... But you guys should check it out... It's really cool.

We like HomeKit, but we haven't yet found an actual reason to prioritize it. We'd reference the statement in our prior note: "ask for the target device you want to control with HomeKit rather than simply HomeKit".

Every one of the items you named except Ecobee is already supported in Roomie. Lutron/Philips/Insteon adding HomeKit support has no impact on the fact that we already control all of those – except that nobody yet owns the HomeKit version of those hubs so our entire userbase would prefer to control all of them without HomeKit. There has been much confusion that existing devices will work with HomeKit, but now that everyone understands nothing existing works with HomeKit (unless you bought something in the last few days), so the demand for it among users is currently low. We can (and have internally) also add Ecobee. So when something comes along that we don't already support, that would be more compelling.

Thank you.