Getting your home outfitted with HomeKit devices at a basic level is great, as you’ll have control from your iPhone and with Siri. But the best part of HomeKit is arguably the Automations you can set up. Read along for how to make HomeKit Automations in the Home app.
A home truly becomes smart when you can have devices like your lights, blinds, locks, thermostat, motion sensors, and more working in concert automatically without having to issue commands or touch your iPhone.
With the Home app, Apple includes a nice user interface to quickly and easily create Automations that help you get the most out of your HomeKit devices.
How to make HomeKit Automations in the Home app
- On iPhone or iPad choose the Automation tab in the bottom right corner (on the Mac Home app Automation tab is in the top center-ish area)
- Tap the + icon in the top right corner
- Chose an option for what will trigger your Automation (e.g. time of day, motion sensor, people arriving or leaving, etc.)
- Follow the prompts
- Choose what HomeKit devices are involved and how they should respond to the Automation being triggered
- When finished, tap Done in the top right corner
Here’s how the process looks on iPhone:
In the example below, I set up a HomeKit motion sensor to turn off the living room lights at night when no motion is detected while turning on a small kitchen light that makes it convenient to grab a glass of water in the middle of the night.
After picking what will trigger your Automation and the parameters around that, you can pick one or more HomeKit devices to respond to the trigger:
As shown in the middle screenshot above, you can test the Automation before you tap Done in the top right corner.
Don’t forget to take advantage of making multiple HomeKit Automations.
For more help with HomeKit, check out our other tutorials:
- How to manually add a HomeKit accessory in the Home app
- How to add and remove favorited HomeKit devices from the Home app main screen
- How to remove HomeKit accessories from the Home app
- How to change HomeKit device icons in the Home app
- How to share HomeKit access on iPhone
- Mac: How to change your Home app wallpaper
And be sure to check out our HomeKit Weekly series diving into all things HomeKit!
