CREATE YOUR DREAM SMART HOME

Lights, cameras, action! Apple Home is where the smart is

- Written by Carrie Marshall

WHETHER YOU LIVE in a small city apartment or a large mansion, any home can be a smart home.

Apple has two key smart home technologies: AirPlay and HomeKit. AirPlay lets you send audio from the Music app on your iPhone to a HomePod or other smart speaker, or stream video from your iPad to an Apple TV 4K.

HomeKit is Apple's smart home platform, and if a device has the “Made for Apple Home” badge, then it's HomeKit-compatible. That means it should connect effortlessly to the Home app, enabling you to control it from any of your Apple devices.

The downside to HomeKit is that to get the logo, Apple set some fairly strict requirements, and is believed to charge royalties to hardware firms, so many firms didn't bother to join the HomeKit party. As a result, the range of HomeKit hardware is relatively small, and the products can be quite expensive compared to rival systems.

That's the bad news. Now for the good. The most important, popular, and affordable third-party smart home devices can work with your Apple Home setup via bridges and hubs that act as connectors between those products and your Apple products. Plus, the Home app supports Matter, the emerging smart-home standard designed to ensure everything works with everything else.

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