I was doing some routine research into home automation when I ran across an article on the Vivint Smart Home website, an article discussing five mobile apps for smart home users. The post’s title implied that anyone into smart home technology should have the five apps on their phones. That led me to wonder how many people believe their smart home cannot function without apps.
The simplest way for me to introduce my point is to ask the following question: do you need mobile apps to run a smart home system? The answer is a qualified ‘maybe’. No, I am not copping out. It is just that there is no simple way to answer the question.
What Mobile Apps Do?
Let us attempt to find an answer by first discussing what mobile apps do for a smart home system. By its nature, a mobile app is an app designed to be used on a mobile device. It should work no matter where the user is, as long as the user has an internet connection. We apply this to home automation, and it becomes clear that a mobile app offers remote access to home automation devices.
The first app mentioned in the Vivint article was their own smart home app. If you had that app on your phone, you could control every device in your Vivint system from anywhere. Adjust a thermostat from work. Let the house cleaner in while you are away on vacation. The possibilities are limited only by the devices you have.
The mobile app also gives you access to programming features. That means you can change programming on the fly. But that’s not all. Most mobile apps let you take advantage of geolocation. You can create a geofence around your home and then program home automation events based on your location.
Access With a Hub
It might seem like attempting home automation without a mobile app wouldn’t get you very far. That is not necessarily true. Inside your home, you could control every device in your system using a smart home hub. A hub is more or less a central control panel to which all of your devices are connected. From that hub you can program devices, turn them on and off, create scenes, and so forth.
Vivint sells its own hub. It turns out you can use smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa as hubs. There are plenty of third-party hubs as well. I personally use an old laptop on which I have installed the Home Assistant platform.
The thing to understand here is that it’s possible to set up a system with a hub that never accesses the internet. You wouldn’t be able to turn lights on or off or adjust a thermostat from work, but everything would still function within your home just as it should. You could still program devices even without remote access.
The Challenge With Apps
Mobile apps are useful. There is no doubt about that. But the challenge in home automation is being stuck with a dozen different apps to control all your devices. That’s where a hub comes in handy. Get a hub that comes with a companion mobile app then you get the best of both worlds.
That is what I have done with Home Assistant. It acts as the hub; all my devices are connected to it. Home Assistant also has a mobile app that lets me control the hub, and all my devices, remotely. If I choose to not use the app, I can still control Home Assistant from within my home.
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