WWDC 2018 HomeKit Changes

Will - Anything you can share about how Simple Control might utilize some of the new HomeKit changes?

Any chance of Marzipan/HomeKit on the Mac allowing the SimpleControl hub app to regain “first class” status and all features?

Have you experimented to see if you can port the iOS SimpleControl app to macOS? (STS has a “mazipanify” hack that seems to be working for a lot of iOS devs to test porting their own apps to the beta.)

Also, very curious what the new “remote control” HomeKit profile really allows and whether it adds any further potential for Simple Control.

Apple paraded the logos of Control4, Savant, and Crestron onstage but everything was vague (and still is vague) on exactly what this can or cannot do.

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Not much good news to report there.

First, the original idea that they added HomeKit to macOS turns out is not true. They added the Home app, not HomeKit. No other apps will have access to HomeKit on macOS until Marzipan late 2019. So I don’t want to say it’s useless, but it is.

I was initially excited about the remotes accessory type in HomeKit, but… that turns out to be another API that has not been released.

Basically, from a technical perspective, the reality of this year’s HomeKit announcements should be interpreted as: “we had some great APIs but they got cancelled earlier this year because some people freaked out about a few bugs in iOS 11, so we’re only doing a couple of quick teasers this year with a Home app on macOS and a few sample implementations of a hard button accessory, but none of this will be part of the APIs or actually available in a real sense until late 2019.”

It could turn out some minor aspect of this will change before the release of iOS 12, but I very much doubt it. Basically, the complainers about iOS 11 got everything cancelled so the real changes will come next year… assuming new complainers aren’t found for iOS 12.

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