Being me, one of the first things I wanted to do in my new home was to set up smart home technology. That’s now almost complete (I’m currently in a mortal combat with presence finders) and I’ll have an update soon.
But there was also the matter of smart home technology that I was leaving behind – and that was not only because of the surprising omission from the Apple Home ecosystem …
Smart homes get mixed reviews from real estate agents. Others are of the opinion that it adds value to the property and should be included in the sale. Some say that the fear of complexity may put off some buyers and you should sell the home without it.
I decided that, uh, the smartest thing to do was to play it by ear: I would test the reaction of potential buyers when viewing the property by showing a few of its different features.
As it turned out, my buyer was very interested in smart home technology, so we agreed that I would leave everything in place. That wasn’t such a sacrifice from the point of view of my new home, as some of the technology had moved on and I was tempted to upgrade anyway. For example, I used the new Hue Gradient Light Strips instead of the single color versions I had in my old place, and now I want a smart key with Apple Key support.
Actually, handing over my old smarthome to its new owner proved to be quite a problem, however, because Apple doesn’t offer any way to do this.
Until a year or two ago, this would have been an esoteric problem. However, smart home technology is becoming more mainstream, and this issue will only increase. We had to use a workaround to provide a temporary solution that would allow my client to move into a working smart home on day one and have less time to organize his takeover of all the kit.
That workaround was to add it as an extra resident in the Apple Home app, and arrange with my broadband provider to leave the device in place for a few weeks while I’m gone. That part worked out, and it all worked out for him when he arrived. But it was only a temporary solution.
In theory, we could do it forever. He could have used the same SSID and password on his new router, and that would have left me as the owner of the Apple Home and him as the resident. A resident, unlike a guest, can add and remove devices, scenes, defaults, and other users. However, there are still other things they can do, such as adding HomePods, Apple TVs, or AirPlay devices.
More importantly, it would be a nuisance for me to have an additional home on the app, and it would be an obvious security and privacy risk in general for previous homeowners to maintain full access to all smart home technology – including locks.
The fact that I had a lot of Philips Hue products helped a lot. All the scenes and automations of this are actually stored in the bridge, and because I left it behind, it was easy to transfer this to the new home. But that doesn’t work with any device used as an Apple Home hub since home settings are tied to the Apple account, not the hardware.
Solving this problem should be straightforward. What Apple should do is allow a third category of users to be added to Apple Home: Owner. Doing this should prompt a warning, and authorizing it should demote the previous owner to Citizenship. This will mean that they retain access during the offer period, with the new owner able to remove them as quickly as they wish.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a problem that will only increase as smart home technology continues to take off. It makes no sense for a home’s main selling point to suddenly stop working as soon as a new owner moves in, or for them to have to painstakingly recreate the home’s setup from scratch, one device at a time.
Is this something you’d like to see Apple do? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
FTC: We use auto affiliate links to earn income. More.
