WWDC 2024: HomeKit Gets Its Biggest Update in Years
Apple has had a complicated relationship with the smart home. HomeKit launched in 2014 with ambitious promises about privacy-first home automation, then spent the next several years falling behind Google and Amazon in features, device compatibility, and developer attention. The Home app redesign in iOS 16 was buggy at launch and frustrated longtime users. By early 2024, the general consensus among smart home enthusiasts was that Apple was not serious about HomeKit. Then WWDC 2024 happened, and Apple proved us wrong — or at least started to.
The Home App Gets a Real Overhaul
The updated Home app in iOS 18 is a significant improvement. The interface is cleaner, with better room-by-room navigation and a new "Activity" tab that shows a timeline of events across all your devices — when doors were locked and unlocked, when motion was detected, when lights were turned on. This is something Home Assistant users have had for years, but for a native Apple app, it is a welcome addition.
The most practical improvement is the expanded automation engine. Automations in the Home app were previously limited to basic triggers: time of day, someone arrives, someone leaves, a sensor detects something. The new version adds conditional logic — if the temperature sensor reads above 75 AND it is after 6 PM AND someone is home, then turn on the fan. You could do this with shortcuts before, but it was convoluted. Having it natively in the Home app's automation builder makes complex automations accessible to non-technical users.
Apple also finally added support for automation suggestions based on your usage patterns. If you manually turn on the porch light every evening around sunset, the Home app will suggest creating an automation for it. This is basic machine learning that Google and Amazon have had for a while, but Apple's implementation ties into their on-device processing approach, which means the pattern analysis happens on your Apple TV or HomePod locally rather than on Apple's servers.
Robot Vacuum Support: Finally
This one caught me off guard. Apple announced native HomeKit support for robot vacuums, which means you will be able to start, stop, and schedule your vacuum from the Home app and through Siri. The initial partners include iRobot (Roomba), Ecovacs (Deebot), and roborock. This is a device category that HomeKit has completely ignored until now, and it is a big deal for Apple-centric smart homes. "Hey Siri, vacuum the living room" becoming a native command is genuinely useful.
The implementation uses Matter for communication, which means any Matter-compatible robot vacuum should eventually work with the Home app. In practice, this will depend on manufacturers updating their firmware to support the new device type, which usually takes a few months after the iOS release.
Guest Access and Sharing Improvements
Apple also addressed one of HomeKit's most frustrating limitations: sharing your home with guests. Previously, sharing your HomeKit home gave someone either full access or no access. There was no middle ground. The new guest access feature lets you share specific rooms and devices with temporary users, with optional time limits. If you have an Airbnb or a guest room, you can give visitors access to the smart lock on their room and the living room lights without exposing your entire home setup. The access automatically revokes after a date you set.
This is genuinely useful for anyone who has houseguests regularly. I have been using a workaround with individual device codes and separate apps for years, and having it built into the Home app with proper access controls is a meaningful improvement.
The Siri and Apple Intelligence Connection
Apple Intelligence, Apple's new AI framework announced at WWDC, has implications for the smart home that they did not fully detail on stage but hinted at in developer sessions. Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence, will have better contextual understanding for home commands. Instead of needing precise syntax ("Set the living room thermostat to 72 degrees"), you should be able to say things like "It is too warm in here" and have Siri figure out which room you are in (based on which Apple device you are speaking to), check the thermostat, and adjust accordingly.
The developer sessions also mentioned "proactive suggestions" for home automations — Siri might suggest turning on lights before you usually get home, or adjusting the thermostat based on the weather forecast. How well this works in practice remains to be seen. Apple has a history of impressive WWDC demos that are less impressive in the shipping product. But the direction is right.
What This Means for the Average HomeKit User
If you have been invested in the Apple ecosystem for your smart home, these updates are encouraging. The Home app is becoming a more capable automation platform, the device compatibility is expanding (robot vacuums, more Matter devices), and the sharing features address real usability gaps. If you have been on the fence about HomeKit versus Google Home or Alexa, the gap is narrowing.
That said, I want to temper expectations. Apple announces features at WWDC that sometimes take months or even years to fully materialize. The HomeKit architecture redesign announced at WWDC 2022 caused reliability issues that took over a year to stabilize. I would not rush to buy new devices based on WWDC announcements — wait for the iOS 18 release in September, let the early adopters find the bugs, and evaluate in October or November whether the new features work as promised.
For Home Assistant users like myself who use HomeKit as a secondary interface, these updates are nice but not transformative. Home Assistant already does everything the new Home app does, and more. But having a better native Apple interface makes it easier for my family to control things without touching the Home Assistant dashboard, and that alone is valuable. The best smart home is one that everyone in the household can use, not just the person who set it up.