They told me they would support HomeKit on the last Doorbell Pro and Floodlight Camera and they never did. I'm not going to do business with them again. Once some good HomeKit enabled 4K doorbells and cameras come out, I will upgrade in the next few years. I tried HomeBridge but it was super unreliable.
For one thing, HomeKit enables you to use Siri to control your devices effortlessly. That's the #1 reason for most of us.
On top of that, having everything under one system makes integrations easier. I had to use Stringify to connect things together because IFTTT is too basic and doesn't even support triggers within certain time frames. Then Stringify was bought out and shut down, I think my Comcast of all companies, and I've had trouble getting my setup to work properly ever since. Since Ring doesn't support standard integrations with some of their products like the Ring Alarm, you can't even extend the functionality of the system. Like when a door opens, I should be able to set that to turn on a light, but I can't without HomeBridge, which like I said has been really unreliable. Furthermore, the app itself doesn't even let you schedule a set time of day to enable and disable the alarm, and there's no way to do this without HomeBridge which only actually set the alarm about 2/3 of the time for me. By having these smart devices connect to a unified system, we can have a standard set of automation tools to control things so that everything is on the same level playing field and behaves as expected for the user. What we have now is a frustrating mess that is a poor user experience.
Lastly, things that support HomeKit Secure Video are fully encrypted and run through our iCloud accounts instead of big corporations like Amazon. Most of us here trust Apple way more than other companies because of their support for privacy and strong end-to-end encryption. With HomeKit Secure Video, you can use your iCloud storage so you don't have to pay for an additional plan from a company that might end support and brick your device, like Belkin recently did with some of their cameras, only giving customers a one month notice in the middle of a pandemic lock-down so they won't be able to check on their remote properties.
With Apple we can depend on a more reliable, unified system. Unfortunately, Apple hasn't done the best job with expanding their foothold in the market, mostly due to unnecessary restrictions when HomeKit first launched to require special chips to encrypt the devices instead of just using software encryption like they do now. That slow start seemed to kill interest for a lot of manufacturers.
For one thing, HomeKit enables you to use Siri to control your devices effortlessly. That's the #1 reason for most of us.
On top of that, having everything under one system makes integrations easier. I had to use Stringify to connect things together because IFTTT is too basic and doesn't even support triggers within certain time frames. Then Stringify was bought out and shut down, I think my Comcast of all companies, and I've had trouble getting my setup to work properly ever since. Since Ring doesn't support standard integrations with some of their products like the Ring Alarm, you can't even extend the functionality of the system. Like when a door opens, I should be able to set that to turn on a light, but I can't without HomeBridge, which like I said has been really unreliable. Furthermore, the app itself doesn't even let you schedule a set time of day to enable and disable the alarm, and there's no way to do this without HomeBridge which only actually set the alarm about 2/3 of the time for me. By having these smart devices connect to a unified system, we can have a standard set of automation tools to control things so that everything is on the same level playing field and behaves as expected for the user. What we have now is a frustrating mess that is a poor user experience.
Lastly, things that support HomeKit Secure Video are fully encrypted and run through our iCloud accounts instead of big corporations like Amazon. Most of us here trust Apple way more than other companies because of their support for privacy and strong end-to-end encryption. With HomeKit Secure Video, you can use your iCloud storage so you don't have to pay for an additional plan from a company that might end support and brick your device, like Belkin recently did with some of their cameras, only giving customers a one month notice in the middle of a pandemic lock-down so they won't be able to check on their remote properties.
With Apple we can depend on a more reliable, unified system. Unfortunately, Apple hasn't done the best job with expanding their foothold in the market, mostly due to unnecessary restrictions when HomeKit first launched to require special chips to encrypt the devices instead of just using software encryption like they do now. That slow start seemed to kill interest for a lot of manufacturers.
