How to Make Any Smart Home Device Work with Apple HomeKit

Because waiting for Matter support will make you a pessimist

An image by the author

Are you a loyal Apple fanboy who loves to use HomeKit to control your smart home devices with your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Mac? Do you also enjoy using Siri to boss around your accessories and create wonderful automation based on your location, time, or triggers?

But what if you have some smart devices that are not made by Apple or do not support HomeKit? For example, maybe you have a Ring doorbell, a Nest thermostat, a TP-Link smart plug, or a Tuna light bulb. Do you have to ditch them all and buy new ones that are approved by Apple? Heck no! That would be like throwing away your perfectly good Jordans just because they don’t match your gothic outfit.

And if you’re someone like me who doesn’t believe in monogamy and has two voice assistants at home, Siri and Alexa, and you want all your smart home devices to work seamlessly with the two, there’s a piece of good news for you.

Although Apple teased support for Matter — a smart home solution that will standardise the framework and make it universally controllable across all platforms — chances are that your existing smart home devices might never get a firmware update that will make them Matter compatible. So does…