Me being me, one of the first things I wanted to do in my new home was set up the smart home technology. That’s now almost complete (I’m currently engaged in mortal battle with presence detectors) and I’ll have an update soon.
But there was also the matter of the smart home tech I was leaving behind – and that was less straightforward thanks to a surprising omission in the Apple Home ecosystem …
Smart homes get mixed reviews from real estate agents. Some take the view that it adds value to a property and should therefore be included in the sale. Others say that fear of complexity may put off some buyers and that you should sell the home without it.
I decided the, uh, smartest thing to do was to play it by ear: I’d test the reaction of potential buyers when they viewed the property by demonstrating several different elements of it.
As it turned out, my buyer was extremely keen on the smart home tech, and we therefore agreed that I’d leave it all in place. That wasn’t such a sacrifice from the perspective of my new home, as some of the tech had moved on and I’d have been tempted to upgrade in any case. For example, I used the new Hue Gradient Light Strips in place of the one-color-at-a-time versions I had in my old place, and I now want a smart lock with Apple Key support.
Actually, handing over my former smarthome to its new owner proved more problematic, however, because Apple doesn’t provide any mechanism to do this.
Until a year or two ago, this would have been a relatively esoteric problem. However, smart home technology is becoming increasingly mainstream, and this issue is going to become more and more common. We had to use a workaround to provide a temporary solution that would allow my buyer to move into a working smart home on day one and have a bit of time to plan his own takeover of all the kit.
That workaround was to add him as an additional Resident in the Apple Home app, and to arrange with my broadband provider to leave the service in place for a couple of weeks after I moved out. That part went to plan, and everything worked for him on arrival. But it was only a temporary solution.
In theory, we could have made it permanent. He could have used the same SSID and password for his new router, and we could have left me as the owner of the Apple Home and him as a Resident. A Resident, unlike a Guest, can add and remove accessories, scenes, automations, and other users. However, there are still some things they cannot do, like add HomePods, Apple TVs, or AirPlay devices.
More significantly, it would be a nuisance for me to have an additional home in the app, and it would be an obvious security and privacy risk more generally for previous owners of homes to retain full access to all the smart home tech – including locks.
The fact that I had so many Philips Hue products helped significantly. All of the scenes and automations for these are actually stored in the bridge, and because I left that behind, then it was simple to transfer these to the new home. But that doesn’t work with whatever device is used as the Apple Home hub as the home settings are tied to the Apple account, not to the hardware.
Solving this problem should be straightforward. All Apple needs to do is to allow a third category of user who can be added to an Apple Home: Owner. Doing this should display a warning, and approving it should downgrade the previous owner to a Resident. This would mean that they retain access during a handover, with the new owner able to remove them as soon as they wish.
As I said earlier, this is a problem that’s going to become increasingly common as smart home tech continues to take off. It makes absolutely no sense for a key selling point of a home to just cease working as soon as the new owner moves in, nor for them to have to painfully recreate the home setup from scratch, one device at a time.
Is this something you would like to see Apple do? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!
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