How to Simplify Your Smart Home in 2024

It's 2024 and I've spent well over the past six months automating my smart home. I'm going to walk you through the platforms you can use to do this and the different types of automations you can create. The first type of automation you can create for your smart home is a trigger-based automation. So when something happens in your home, like a light turning off, someone opens the front door, walks by a motion sensor, or hits a button, you can use these types of events to trigger something else to happen. But how does that work in practice? This, well, here are a few examples. When you open your closet door, you can use a motion sensor to register that movement and automate the closet lights to turn on using a smart home platform or a device specific app like Philips Hue. Another example would be when your TV turns on. You can set all of the lights in the room to automatically turn off in the Apple Home app for example. All right, now this automation, it's a bit more advanced. When I'm watching TV, often I'll turn on Do Not Disturb via the action button on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. At the same time, I usually want to turn on Cinema Mode on my Apple Watch which dims its display. Well, you can actually create an automation based off of when you turn on and off Do Not Disturb using the action button by using Siri shortcuts. This is possible because we can pull the status of the TV. So if the TV is on when I turn on Do Not Disturb via the action button, Cinema Mode will automatically turn on via my Apple Watch without me having to do anything. Now the second type of automation you can set up for your home is time-based. So you can set an automation to occur at a specific time on a specific day or just on weekends or on weekdays. Here are some examples of this. Your coffee machine can start up at 830 a.m. every morning using a little button presser device called the SwitchBot which I've done a video on. You can have your blinds automatically open when you wake up or you can set your fan to automatically turn on when your room hits a certain temperature. Lighting is another significant area where time-based automations can be beneficial. Here's an example. You can set up different scenes in different rooms with smart lights so you're getting not only the right color temperature light throughout the day but the right amount of brightness as well. So your lights can be brighter and a daylight temp in the morning and transition to a warmer color and are more relaxing and dimmer in the evening hours which can help boost melatonin production so you get to sleep on time. And you can even use light fades to fade out your lights in the evening at a specific time or fade them in in the morning to wake you up. I've been waking up to my smart lights coming on now for years instead of just solely relying on an alarm clock and let me tell you you just feel way more refreshed with that approach than just using an alarm on your phone. So those are the two basic types of automations that you can create for a smart home. All right now let's take a look at the platforms and applications you can actually use to create these automations for your smart home. Now the first group that it makes sense to take a look at are the platforms from the big tech companies so that's Apple, Google, Amazon, and Samsung. While each platform can do the same basic types of automations there are some unique features each one offers that could sway you over to using it. For example Amazon has a feature called hunches which are AI based automations that automatically do things in your home like turning off your lights at 2 a.m. if it knows you don't normally have your lights on then. With that feature you're getting the benefit of smart home automations without actually having to create one. Moving on to Google, Google has a newly launched script editor which allows you to automate your home using routines which is what Google refers to as automations. With the script editor the big plus here is it allows you to create advanced household routines with additional starters, conditions, actions, and advanced logic which you can access by going to home.google.com. Now if you're not used to coding in a scripting language or you just need some help they also added a help me script generative AI feature to help you create custom Google home routines. I've played around with it a bit and while it's not perfect it does greatly expand the type of automations you can do with Google Home bringing it much closer to the more advanced systems like Apple's shortcuts, Homey, and of course Home Assistant. Google also has a really nice activity log that's useful for monitoring and troubleshooting your automations. It's in a more prominent area of their UI and is better designed than others I've seen from the big tech players like Amazon. Next let's talk about Apple. Apple's home offering actually gets you quite a bit. Its automations are locally controlled via HomeKit hubs which are either a HomePod or Apple TV that you have in your home. The Home app is a really simple to use for automations especially for creating automations based off when something happens to a smart device in your home like the TV turning off. For more advanced automations you'll need to use Apple's shortcuts app though unfortunately with shortcuts at the time of recording it doesn't let you use smart home devices as a trigger like you can do in Apple's Home app. Alright next before we get to Samsung SmartThings here's a quick word from this video's sponsor Narwhal. 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Now one of the biggest things to be aware of when you're doing smart home automations is the platform or app you're using to create those automations running and saving them locally. Ideally, that's what you want. Usually, these automations are saved to your local hub device or server. This way, automations will run faster and will still run if your internet goes down. Right now, Apple's HomeKit is the only one out of the big four that pretty much runs all locally. The other ones rely on either full or partial cloud support. And while SmartThings does rely on a hub, weirdly when I tried looking up whether or not it was running everything locally, I couldn't find anything that said it did. It seems to be running a lot of stuff from cloud servers. Now the next platforms to talk about are two other hub platforms that aren't from big tech companies. The first one being Home Assistant. Home Assistant works locally, integrates with practically any smart home device, and is one of the largest open source software projects in existence. Now if you have an issue with your smart home devices not all integrating together, it's very likely that you'll be able to bring everything together within Home Assistant and then automate it. Home Assistant has a reputation for being somewhat difficult to get into and maintain, though that's become less so over the years as the software has matured and newer plug and play products have come out like Home Assistant Green, which is a 100 US dollar server that runs Home Assistant and a product I'm currently reviewing. So if you want to see my six months later review of it, make sure you're subscribed. Automations in Home Assistant are really advanced. You can have triggers based on devices, entities which are like subparts of a device, weather, time of day, persistent notifications, geolocation, etc. You can add multiple triggers, multiple conditions, and they have what are called building blocks like if this then, A slash B conditions. You can define variables, repeat a sequence of actions, run something in parallel, stop, wait for a trigger or time to pass, and more. It really allows you to do a lot. Plus, Home Assistant has all sorts of community-based add-ons like Node-RED, which can give you a similar view to the next platform to talk about, which is Homey. Homey, like Home Assistant, has a locally-based hub called Homey Pro, though if you just want to use the Homey platform and test it out and not spend money right away on their hub, you can do that as well. Homey allows you to connect devices to its hub directly, and it integrates with many major smart home brands, though not as many as Home Assistant in my experience so far. Homey's automations, which are called Flows and Advanced Flows, are really easy to use. You can build something simple or pretty complex with Advanced Flows, and I love the Wirelink graphical interface they designed where you can map out everything you want to have happen in your automation. And when you test it, you can see it running visually in real time, which can aid in troubleshooting. So those are the two other platforms based around hubs that aren't from major tech companies. Now the last thing you can use to create automations in your smart home are companion apps for smart home devices. Now I know ideally everything would just work with the one platform that you chose and it would all run locally, but at least for me and my smart home, this is not the case. And this is because for some smart home devices, the manufacturer has built in certain functionality and features that are exclusive to their app and not available in the big smart home platforms. Typically the automations you can build in these apps are easy to set up, though you're not usually able to run them locally. The Philips Hue app is a great example of this, though most of their automations from what I can tell seem to be stored locally unless they're based on something like the local sunset time. The Hue app is where I set up my scenes, automations for when light should be set to a scene plus light timers, fade outs, and linking Hue motion sensors to lights. And while yes, Hue devices can be controlled from all the smart home platforms I mentioned earlier, there are still things the Hue app does better like scenes and automations. So that's a quick rundown of a lot of the platforms and some of the apps that you can use to create automations, but which one should you actually use? In 2024, my recommendation would be Apple Home for Apple ecosystem households, and then you can use something like Home Assistant or Homey for more advanced automations, and then something like Home Bridge to bring non-homekit devices into Apple Home. For everyone else, I'd probably go with Homey or Home Assistant. Because of that local control, and then you can use them in conjunction with your smart speaker assistant of choice, though if you go the Homey route, you'll especially want to make sure it actually works with everything you have or plan to buy. Even if it has an app for a specific brand like Aqara for example, it may not support all of Aqara's devices like their new FP2 presence sensor, so just be aware of that. Now if you want to see more examples of the smart home automations I've created as well as the smart home devices I'm actually using, check out my 2024 smart home tour which you can get to here, or check out some of my other smart home videos in a playlist that you can get to here. Don't forget to smash that like button if you like this video and subscribe to the channel for more. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks for watching.