Siri-Powered Smart Home Hub Isn’t Likely Coming Until 2026
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The challenges Apple is facing in smartening up Siri are having a much broader impact than simply delaying the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Last year, several reports gave us hope that the long-awaited Apple smart home hub was just around the corner, but now it looks like that may not arrive before 2026 at the soonest.
That’s the latest from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who reported in November that a wall-mounted smart Home Hub could arrive early this year. Gurman revised that estimate in March, noting that even though Apple employees are already testing these units in their homes, they rely on the more advanced Siri that’s been pushed back to a later iOS 19 release.
Nevertheless, there was some optimism that the Home Hub would still be ready later this year, perhaps launching alongside the iPhone 17 lineup in September. After all, the hardware is seemingly ready — it’s just the software that needs polishing.
Sadly, Apple is “considering a delay until 2026, when the Siri features are expected to land,” Gurman says. Testing of the device reportedly continues with “a large number of employees trying it out at home,” but it’s uncertain when it will be ready for market.
Another Squandered Lead?
Like Siri itself, Apple’s smart home ambitions have taken a strange and winding road. It’s probably no surprise that living room projects play second fiddle to the iPhone — not to mention other initiatives like the iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro. However, it’s another area where Apple has squandered its potential lead.
It’s hard to believe that Apple unveiled HomeKit in 2014—the same year that Amazon debuted Alexa. HomeKit had a slow start, relying almost entirely on third-party apps to take advantage of the underlying frameworks that Apple had baked into its operating systems. However, those frameworks provided some powerful automation features that Apple’s main rivals, Amazon and Google, took years to even begin to implement.
When a first-party Home app appeared two years later in iOS 10, it seemed that Apple’s home automation platform was ready for prime time. While others relied primarily on voice controls and lacked any features more sophisticated than turning things on and off, the Home app lets you turn your iPhone or iPad into a dashboard for your home, giving you touchscreen access to lights, fans, thermostats, locks, garage doors, and more.
Sadly, two major and seemingly contradictory roadblocks prevented HomeKit from really taking off. Apple exerted a great deal of control over third-party accessories that would be HomeKit compatible while also declining to create any of its own, including any kind of Home Hub.
As per its usual approach to iPhone and iPad accessories, Apple insisted that all accessory makers be part of its MFi program and include dedicated hardware chips in their devices for security and encryption. This delayed products from coming to market quickly and left out quite a few who were unwilling to play by Apple’s rules or pay the higher licensing premiums.
The first HomeKit-compatible devices didn’t go on sale until late 2015, a year after Apple first announced the technology, and that wasn’t because Apple’s partners were dragging their heels. Several companies I met with at CES 2015 were long-established Apple MFi partners. They had begun developing HomeKit accessories under strict non-disclosure agreements several months before Apple made its official announcement.
Despite this head start, they all still struggled to get their accessories ready, and it didn’t help that they all had to be certified by Apple, delaying things even further. The first ones didn’t launch until late 2015 — a year after Apple announced HomeKit to the world and nearly two years after it invited those companies to develop accessories.
Meanwhile, Amazon took a much more open approach, providing software development kits (SDKs) that anyone could adopt to plug into the Alexa ecosystem without any special hardware requirements. Even older accessories that pre-dated Alexa could gain compatibility with Amazon’s platform through firmware updates. Amazon also released a series of affordable hubs that could be dropped around the home. Google quickly followed suit with both an open accessory development ecosystem and a lineup of first-party accessories that grew out of its Nest acquisition — including the Nest thermostat.
The result is that while only a handful of accessories gained HomeKit compatibility — even today, that total is no more than a few hundred — Amazon could boast well over 10,000 Alexa-compatible devices out of the gate. Amazon also didn’t police device categories nearly as strictly as Apple did, which meant that Alexa was able to handle everything from air purifiers to kitchen stoves years before HomeKit added them (and many of these still aren’t part of HomeKit).
Apple loosened things up a bit in 2018, allowing devices to join HomeKit through software updates. Still, it was arguably too late by then, as Amazon and even Google had gained a foothold from the territory that Apple had ceded with its early intransigence. Sure, Apple’s method for HomeKit was far more secure, but the home automation market proved that people want options and convenience more than they want security. Besides, that may be very important for things like door locks, but most home automation devices don’t require a high level of security.
Today, the Matter standard has promised to close that gap. It no longer matters whether an accessory is HomeKit-compatible as long as it’s Matter-compatible. iOS 18.4 has added support for robot vacuums, but that’s entirely via the new Matter standard. There’s no longer any need to create a “HomeKit-compatible” vacuum.
However, Matter only works for home accessories. It doesn’t do anything for “controllers” like home hubs or even smart speakers (the Matter standard supports speakers — but only for playback). Matter is about making sure accessories work with any ecosystem — it’s not about unifying the ecosystems themselves.
In other words, an Echo Show will only control Matter devices set up with Alexa, and a Nest Hub will only control Matter devices set up with Google Home. The same goes for smart speakers — a HomePod can control HomeKit devices and those Matter devices added to HomeKit, but it can’t touch the Amazon or Google ecosystems.
That’s why Apple is working on its own home hub, as the alternative is for folks to abandon the HomeKit ecosystem for greener pastures. Even before Matter, most HomeKit accessories were equally compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Home, but HomePods aren’t, which means folks in those ecosystems won’t be buying their smart speakers from Apple anymore.
How much Apple needs to care about this is open for debate. Certainly, its home accessories make up a fraction of its sales — in the 2024 holiday quarter, the entire “Wearables, Home, and Accessories” category accounted for only 9% of Apple’s overall revenue, and that includes AirPods and Apple Watch sales, which are almost certainly selling better than HomePods and Apple TVs. Still, Apple likes to try and provide all the pieces of a complete ecosystem, and there’s a halo effect to consider here… Once folks leave HomeKit, that’s one less reason to consider sticking with an iPhone, iPad, or Mac for their next device purchase.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
