hello Automators thanks for tuning in again I have a breakdown here for how
iOS and the iPhones in general and iPads will work in your home in your smart
home specifically
what we're going to do today is go through the benefits and some of the
negatives for iOS and iPhones in your smart home since its inception iOS has
really been the front runner in terms of a lot of great capabilities and
functionality and the biggest thing that they've always been on the front end of
is applications or apps as we like to call them today
now the applications that you have access to as an Automator really it's
everything out there there's maybe one omission that I'll get to here in a
minute but you have if this then that you have stringify you have you know me
you have the yeti application and really you have access to all of the major
makers of smart home equipment so Google Amazon Samsung and of course Apple now
that's where things start to differentiate between iOS and say
Android you have home kit and home kit is Apple's own platform for SmartThings
around your home home kit has some benefits and it has some drawbacks now
ultimately home kit is Wi-Fi based or it's not really a hub it doesn't really
act like a hub they give you access now to use devices like the home pod as a
hub but ultimately you don't really have a hub that manages devices on ZigBee
networks and you don't have hubs that manage z-wave Network so really you're
limited to in general Wi-Fi devices what is very impressive about home kit to me
is even without that hub what you do have access to is still some pretty good
automation or a medium level of automation through homekit whereby you
can trigger things when you trigger on a light you can trigger things when you
return home or everyone leaves or somebody leaves you're also able to
trigger things off of sensors now we have to talk a little bit about hardware
because ultimately the iPhones and the iPads are one component to that but the
hardware around home kit devices tends to be more expensive just like the
hardware on the phones of themselves so what
you are buying into is a little bit more of an expensive ecosystem of home
automation when you buy into an iPhone and start using apple homekit now that
isn't to say that home kit isn't good it's just only good at a few things and
is relatively expensive versus say something like Samsung SmartThings or
another z-wave hub a homey hub or things like that where you can go and get
relatively inexpensive sensors and the comparison I'm really going to give you
is a smart thing sensor will cost you twenty to twenty-five dollars whereas in
general when you're looking at sensors on the home kit side of things you're
talking about a $50 sensor if we're talking about automation on an iPhone an
iPad or anything related to Apple devices we have to talk about their
voice assistant now Siri is onboard these devices and she is relatively
capable when it comes to voice assistance and if I was talking to you a
year ago you probably would have laughed at me for saying that but now Siri
reliably or consistently on tests that are going on in the industry is the
second most capable and the second most accurate voice assistant on the market
today so not only is she capable of utilizing your smart home or home
automation equipment that you have connected to home kit but now with
something called shortcuts she is capable of running a lot of automation
that you can create or get from other people on your iPhone speaking of
shortcuts this is looking into the future now shortcuts is a highly highly
capable essentially scripting application or the basis of programming
application on your iPhone and it used to be called workflow so workflow was
really one of the first things that you could go and add multiple actions off of
one command you could push a button or you could trigger something and then you
could have multiple actions now what's amazing about shortcuts and what
I really look to the future in with iOS is shortcuts the integration with Siri
is great because you can have any shortcut triggered by Siri now on top of
that the shortcuts I have seen things where their scripts basically rate on
the phone and that is built by someone they go and they build that on top of
that you can also trigger different things in applications so you can send
content applications for example you can send a picture to Instagram and have it
pre-loaded or fully filled out basically your description and your tags before
you get into Instagram and that picture is all loaded and ready to go on top of
that and this is the really impressive stuff to me I've seen web server side
scripts being run by shortcuts and what I mean by that you know I use a couple
of shortcuts on a relatively daily basis when I look at Amazon products and I
want to know what the price history is I have an application or a shortcut on my
phone that I can actually just hit the share button go to that shortcut and
then get the full price history for that item so very very impressive
functionality and I do that all with one press of the button and it works on
amazon CA amazon.com it works really on any of them and it gives it to me in
whatever dollar output I'd like all of this capability is on a platform that is
clearly not going away iOS is here to stay and even you know I
mean that as a little bit of a negative I don't see Apple going and rebuilding
iOS to launch into the future and to really give us a new world to live in
they're still relying on their big App Store to give you all kinds of
functionality and they're still relying on a lot of things from iOS that have
been built for many many years so it's starting to feel a little old to me and
it does feel like Android and the new future OS that Google is producing could
leap ahead of iOS some of the biggest limitations
for Apple on iOS and their iPhone devices are self-imposed and this is
Apple trying to keep you in their ecosystem or in their system and
especially homekit and Siri now what they've done most recently with
shortcuts is they actually stopped Google from using it in a really really
powerful way so what you used to be able to do is trigger your Google assistant
to run something with a shortcut through series so you could just literally hold
the button on your iPhone have Siri come up and you could say the trigger word
for your shortcut and then it could run Google assistant now what Apple
immediately did was closed off components of that and we've seen them
do this with things like Google Maps which is still in my opinion the better
Maps application we see them do this with email they don't really allow you
to use another default email or browser or any of those things so they really
close off the system and this creates limitations so we're not going to be
able to as home Automator x' using an iOS device ever utilize the Google
assistant which is the most powerful voice assistant on the planet and I
think it will be for a very long time or Amazon's voice assistant which is the
most popular voice assistant on the planet right now on our iPhones or not
in a very easy to use or highly integrated way because Apple keeps
closing that off now we have to switch over to hardware because we do have to
talk about what you're building on if you're using iOS now we've seen home pod
come out and relatively I would say home pod has not gone very far and I like the
device in my home don't get me wrong I really enjoy it and again what Apple
does they do really well at so there's nothing on home pod that I have been
frustrated by whereas you know when you look at the Google home in the
eko series of products you can get frustrated by things that they don't do
because they're trying to do so much or things that they don't do well because
again they're trying to do so much now on the flip side home pod only does a
few things right now but what it does it does it accurately and it does it really
well it's very seamless and it was easy to set up on top of that the home pod
speaker is literally unparalleled I have not had a better speaker and for people
who already like iPhones and this goes to you folks with spouses I was able to
get my wife to start using home automation equipment only after I got
Siri in the house on the home pod on top of the home pod you of course have
iPhones and iPads now if you already have one of those devices in your home
it's really easy to have home kit basically go across in your home to your
other iOS device so it's really just about hitting a share button or an
invitation button and sending that invitation to the other device some of
the drawbacks of iOS and these iPhone devices to me ultimately when you look
at Android and you see the widget capability and we have a little bit of a
widget capability now on iPhones and iPads where we can kind of swipe to the
left and we go to that widget interface and we get one or two things that are
useful the difference to me on an android is you can go ahead and really
create a dashboard for yourself and that to me will be more and more powerful as
we go forward and this triggers me into talking about home pot - and we talked a
little bit about home pot but ultimately home pod 2 is what I see being the
device that changes this for iOS what do I mean by that it's already been
reported that we're going to see face ID on home pod 2 so to me that means it's a
tablet in my opinion the Apple home pod 2 will actually be
I pad that you could probably mount somewhere and we'll have a very good
home kit based interface to control your smart home so it's not going to be less
expensive than the home pod it's going to be more expensive finishing off the
hardware discussion ultimately when you look at an iPhone these days it is $1000
plus and there's very few versions of their products I know they have the XR
rate now that it are under $1000 and we're talking u.s. dollars here so these
are very very expensive devices and again I don't think home pod is going to
be cheaper I think we're going to get a more expensive version in the original
home pod might get shrunk down a little bit to become a little less expensive
but ultimately Apple's devices are very very expensive and you don't have the
range of options that an Android device does so really what I'm telling you
about iOS as a device in your smart home or for your smart home it is relatively
powerful and the shortcuts feature really excites me but the expense of
these devices sometimes outstrips what I believe is their capability for your
smart home so if managing your smart home is going to be really important for
you in the end you may want to look at Android devices now in the coming weeks
here in the coming days rather I'm going to be talking about Android and how it
does compare to iOS and what you have to watch out for with Android devices so
stay tuned for that guys and we'll see you next time