It’s been at least a decade since your choice of operating system presented any real challenge to obtaining specific software or hardware, but smart technology has been slower to catch up. It's been much more common in recent years to discover that many devices worked with Android, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa—but not Apple Home. If you wanted to control your lightbulbs with your Android phone without any additional hardware, you probably could, but iPhone users were out of luck.
iOS 18, out earlier this week, changes that for the better.
For some context, Apple Home refers to the entire Apple smart home ecosystem generally, and is also the name of the smart home app for your iPhone. Apple HomeKit is the underlying technology for Apple Home, Siri is the voice assistant that these devices use, and Apple offers devices like the HomePod as smart home hubs.
Things began to get better two years ago with the introduction of Matter and Thread, two industry-wide protocols for connecting smart devices. Devices with the new standards helped the exclusivity problem by being able to work with any Matter-compliant hub, and through that hub, the Apple Home app on your phone. As more companies signed onto the Matter standard, the devices they made became Home compatible. The only catch was that these devices still required the hub (HomePod and Apple TV 4K are both Matter compatible).
It's ironic, because the premise of Matter was to free people from requiring a bunch of individual hubs. Even if you only need one, it means an extra piece of hardware you have to shepherd through updates and upkeep, and it's an extra step to associate the device to the hub, too. In most cases, Google Home and Android Alexa users didn't have the same friction—they could often just connect devices to their digital assistants.
This week, it got easier. Apple released iOS 18, and with it, the possibility of breaking free of those hubs and connecting the Home app directly to any Matter device, so long as your iPhone has iOS 18. The same connectivity applies to Thread devices, so as long as you have an iPhone 15 or newer, because those devices have an onboard Thread radio. So, again, if you just want to turn your Matter lightbulbs on and off without any drama, you can now do that with your iPhone.
There are still great arguments for having a hub, though. While connecting to your phone directly frees you from the jumble of hardware in the home, hubs allow device-to-device integration, creating powerful automations. If you want those lightbulbs to only come on when a sensor is triggered, or for the lightbulbs to determine if your window shades are up or down, that will still require a hub. If you’re not ready to commit to a whole home system and just want one or two devices, connecting them directly to your iPhone is now a seamless process.
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