Review: How Eve's Matter Accessories Work With a HomeKit Setup

[Powerbooky]

I opted for the Eve Matter "early adoption" programme hence why I have the latest Matter firmware (3.1) on the available hardware. I cannot imagine that this will be a forced update, I am sure that you would be able to ignore it when it eventually appears on the Eve app around springtime as forecasted by Eve.

For me, 16.2 was a nightmare with its constant connectivity and "no response" issues. Hard to tell if 16.3 has fixed the issue since I am having the same issues, however I have currently disabled the Apple TV as Home Hub leaving the Home Hub designated to the HomePod mini and it now appears to be steady. Not sure if there is a conflict between the Apple TV and the HomePod mini when they switch over to be the "Connected" hub.

Could be, a couple of tvOS versions ago I had trouble with one ATV that has a Wifi connection. Every time when it took over the "connected" status, not every trigger was processed well. Especially those from/to the HUE hub. Only when the wired ATV was "connected" everything went well. Strangely enough, the few moments when a HomePod mini was the master, also on the same Wifi, everything worked fine too albeit slightly slower.
Ever since last versions of iOS/tvOS/HomePod OS 15.x I haven't run into serious problems anymore and kind of forgot to check which device is "master" every week. Version 16 was for me a bit faster too, even though there are more Homekit devices now and some more rules. Maybe HomeKit spreads out all the processing on multiple HomePods and ATV's better now?
I have a couple of complex rules that operate the sunroof. It looks at light levels, weather situation, sun position and time of day and since version 16 it works quite well. Not perfect.

Version 16.3 was installed almost immediately on all HomePod mini's when it was released and I haven't noticed problems so far. The ATV's followed a week later. All devices are setup to do updates automatically.

 

[MacRumorUser78]

Stopped reading at this point. The whole point of Matter is to enable cross eco-system compatibility, but this review didn't test this...

Isn't this site MacRumors?

 

[MacRumorUser78]

I had hoped Matter would negate the need for another app, Eve, in this case. Guess we have to wait for more simplicity. I just counted, I have 12 apps and I didn't think I was that far into this mess.

Reading other replies, am reminded that hubs aren't required. I never bought anything that required a hub since as I was trying to simplify, not make things more complicated.

 

[kiranmk2]

f

Isn't this site MacRumors?

It is, but what is the point of this review without looking at cross-eco system compatibility. If you had an EVE product and operated an Apple-only ecosystem, what is the benefit of moving to Matter over HomeKit which can be controlled from the Home app / Siri already? The main benefit of Matter is to make it easier to mix and match voice assistant eco-systems.

 

[jg167]

As long as I have to use the Nest app to control my Protects (especially silencing false alarms when I burn something in the kitchen) I'd like to dedicate an older iPad to this task and access HomeKit on it to for my iDevices, but to make that really work split view would be nice, but Nest still doesn't support it or so the app says when it comes up in split view. It sort of works but not really.
Running the Nest app on the iPad (or iPhone) also allows connection to a Protect via bluetooth if wifi has gone done and that won't happen if HomeKit is all there is. So getting full split view support in the Nest App would be nice (after all this time, come on!).

As an update Homebridge is a suggestion. But there are some issues here. First it has to have a host to run on and that means another thing to support (I run HomeKit on AppleTV). Second if wifi is out, an iPad near a protect (the one that has the highest chance of false alarms in my kitchen) can use bluetooth but my AppleTV is not close enough to do so, even if this were supported. So I think running the HomeKit app and nest on a iPad is still the best bet and thus I would still like the Nest app to support split view. But I'm guessing google is doing zero work on the Nest app.