The smart home according to Apple

Apple unveiled several new Smart Home features at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and hinted at an interesting prospect of unlocking the front door with an iPhone using a digital key in the Wallet app. The new Apple feature will then allow users to unlock the front door or garage door with their iPhone, provided a compatible smart lock has been installed. At the conference it was understood that major lock suppliers will be involved in the development and support of this function. Apple is adopting a different strategy for the smart home than that designed for its core iOS and MacOS platforms. In the latter, the company builds the hardware and controls the software, while for the Smart Home features it prefers to encourage third-party hardware manufacturers to adopt Apple’s platform (HomeKit) to develop their projects without problems. In this direction, it also integrates on HomeKit the options for controlling air conditioners, video cameras, motion sensors, doorbells and lights. The goal is to position the iPhone and Apple Watch as controllers for a wide variety of home functions, making them central to home management and thus building customer loyalty across the range of Apple devices, including Apple TV and HomePod. Apple announced their support for Matter, a standard designed to allow smart home gadgets to work together, confirming that they have contributed to the project, in which Amazon, Google and Samsung also participate. with an open source HomeKit code. Matter’s goal is to ensure that smart home devices remain compatible for years to come and make developing new apps easier. For developers, the HomeKit code will work with Matter without any changes. Still on the home theme, HomeKit will soon be able to use Siri to schedule smart lights to turn on, for example every day at 8:00 am and cameras will be able to check when a package is been delivered: just keep the situation under control from an Apple TV in full screen mode and, if necessary, easily turn on the lights remotely to illuminate the surrounding environment. Smart home cameras will be able to securely and privately store movies on iCloud through a feature called HomeKit Secure Video.