HomeKit and Android

Apple provides a HomeKit framework in iOS 8, which makes it easy for iOS developers to integrate HomeKit accessories into their apps. Siri supports HomeKit out of the box which allows users to manage their accessories via voice commands like “Hey Siri, turn on the lights”.

Depending on when Home Automation hardware will support HomeKit (I think we will see the first at CES 2015), it will become the de facto standard, because there is no real standard yet. Don’t underestimate how important HomeKit will become in the next years.

Android

HomeKit is not available for Android and Apple will obviously never support it on Android. Not that I care about Android but hardware manufacturers have to make a decision to either support HomeKit and don’t support Android devices, or to invest their time and energy in developing their own protocols and (crappy) apps. Everybody agrees that HomeKit is a huge step forward into bringing order to chaos. Too much hardware was built around propiertary standards. Unfortunately HomeKit is not better in this regard because it excludes Android users.

One solution would be to bring HomeKit to Android. Since Go 1.4 you can write Android apps in Go and HomeControl is written in Go (you get it?). HomeControl already contains code to simulate a connected client for unit testing, which can be used to create a HomeKit compatible Android app. It’s just a crazy idea.