I started out my Smart Home with Nest, and have added Nest Protects, Nest Cams, Philips Hue everywhere and a Logitech Harmony Hub. I use Amazon Echo and Homekit through an Apple TV 4th Gen and the iDevices in the home. For the Nest and Harmony devices I have to either use Homebridge running on a Raspberry Pi (challenging to set up if you aren't an IT pro) or something like IFTTT to get it to play ball with everything else. As far as the Dropcam and Protect, there is sooo much potential integration which is totally missing due to Nest only really playing ball with Google kit. For example, Nest Protect detects movement but this ability is not usable by things like Philips Hue to use as a motion sensor to turn it on, DropCam integration with anything other than IFTTT is non existent. Homebridge does work reasonably well with Nest Thermostat but none of the other Nest products do. Philips Hue so far works with just about everything.
If I was starting again, I most certainly wouldn't choose Nest at all, regardless of how sleek they look, because at the end of the day, it is just a collection of sensors which needs to play ball with the rest of the smart home and with Nest you are truly locked in, largely because most HomeKit products also work with Amazon Echo and have a certain level of security which is a comfort in the era of Chinese webcam bot swarms...if Smart Home manufacturers can't or won't certify to Homekit standard, it's either a technical impediment or a political one, and neither is acceptable these days.
The biggest momentum in Smart Home is currently behind Amazon Alexa, closely followed by Apple HomeKit, Samsung Smart things (also thanks to Legacy Z-Wave integration) and Google Home in that order. One major problem is that every platform from Lutron, to Samsung to Hue requires its own hub and you can see that this mess of interoperability is a pretty big problem for the industry. That said, most of the biggest more respected brands like Lutron, Honeywell etc are now starting to bring to market devices which are all HomeKit compatible as standard and there is more decent choice for Thermometers which are now catching up to Nest's first mover advantage, largely because there was a rotten period for Nest when they hardly launched anything and kept changing their mind on what standards to support. Being delisted by Apple surely can't have helped. The whole delisting thing though from Amazon not stocking Apple TV or Chromecast to Apple not stocking Nest is wholly anti-consumer in the truest sense of the words.
And people complain about using dongles and adaptors for Apple products. This thing needs a whole computer running Linux!
At first I thought it was complicated but I found some instructions that make it really simple to use your Nest Thermostat with Apple HomeKit. You don't need a computer running Linux either. Take a look at How to control Nest Thermostat with Siri.
Comments
I started out my Smart Home with Nest, and have added Nest Protects, Nest Cams, Philips Hue everywhere and a Logitech Harmony Hub. I use Amazon Echo and Homekit through an Apple TV 4th Gen and the iDevices in the home. For the Nest and Harmony devices I have to either use Homebridge running on a Raspberry Pi (challenging to set up if you aren't an IT pro) or something like IFTTT to get it to play ball with everything else. As far as the Dropcam and Protect, there is sooo much potential integration which is totally missing due to Nest only really playing ball with Google kit. For example, Nest Protect detects movement but this ability is not usable by things like Philips Hue to use as a motion sensor to turn it on, DropCam integration with anything other than IFTTT is non existent. Homebridge does work reasonably well with Nest Thermostat but none of the other Nest products do. Philips Hue so far works with just about everything.
If I was starting again, I most certainly wouldn't choose Nest at all, regardless of how sleek they look, because at the end of the day, it is just a collection of sensors which needs to play ball with the rest of the smart home and with Nest you are truly locked in, largely because most HomeKit products also work with Amazon Echo and have a certain level of security which is a comfort in the era of Chinese webcam bot swarms...if Smart Home manufacturers can't or won't certify to Homekit standard, it's either a technical impediment or a political one, and neither is acceptable these days.
The biggest momentum in Smart Home is currently behind Amazon Alexa, closely followed by Apple HomeKit, Samsung Smart things (also thanks to Legacy Z-Wave integration) and Google Home in that order. One major problem is that every platform from Lutron, to Samsung to Hue requires its own hub and you can see that this mess of interoperability is a pretty big problem for the industry. That said, most of the biggest more respected brands like Lutron, Honeywell etc are now starting to bring to market devices which are all HomeKit compatible as standard and there is more decent choice for Thermometers which are now catching up to Nest's first mover advantage, largely because there was a rotten period for Nest when they hardly launched anything and kept changing their mind on what standards to support. Being delisted by Apple surely can't have helped. The whole delisting thing though from Amazon not stocking Apple TV or Chromecast to Apple not stocking Nest is wholly anti-consumer in the truest sense of the words.