'Apple Home' is increasingly replacing HomeKit references in beta software

AppleInsider

Apple's tvOS 26 beta removing HomeKit branding and adding "Apple Home" shouldn't be a surprise, since Apple has been on that road for two years.

First mention of "Apple Home" in a beta of tvOS 26 -- image credit: The Verifier

HomeKit is now over ten years old, having been announced during the launch of iOS 8 in 2014. In that time, it's rather failed to make the impact Apple may have hoped for, and alongside some fundamental technology changes, the company is also quite slowly rebranding it.

The latest example of this has been spotted by Israeli publication, The Verifier. It shows how tvOS 26 has now reworded its Settings menus from "AirPlay & HomeKit," to "AirPlay & Apple Home."

It follows Apple's move in iOS 18.4 to force users to upgrade to the new HomeKit architecture. That came in 2025, but the first release of the updated version of HomeKit, was as far back as November 2022.

Since then, there have been various references in the code for operating systems such as iOS 26. One notable one even gave a hint to the screen size of a predicted Apple Home Hub, now expected in 2026.

Craig Federighi launching the original HomeKit in 2014 -- image credit: Apple

Separately, this Home Hub is rumored to be being tested by Apple staff, and it was even a surprise that the expected "homeOS" was not unveiled at WWDC 2025.

Yet Apple has been steadily working to put everything in place for this new smart home project. It has the benefit now of supporting Matter, the open smart home standard that has also been adopted by Samsung, Google, and more.

So now instead of being confined to working only with smart devices explicitly made to work with HomeKit, Apple users should be able to buy and use devices from any manufacturer. Apple's HomeKit was never going to supplant its rivals, but now any device can come under the control of Apple Home.

This new report of the Apple Home branding is an early occurrence of it appearing in software that users will be able to see, once the beta test is over. But it's far from the first sign of the branding at all.

Back in January 2025, for instance, Apple announced that it was making it easier for third-party firms to gain what was once called "Works with HomeKit." And is now "Works with Apple Home."

AppleInsider has also been told of cases where Apple has actually chastized brands who referred to HomeKit instead of Apple Home.

Note that overall, The Verifier does not have good track record in Apple reports. However, this claim is backed up by screen shots showing the new wording, and is getting picked up by more conventional media as a sea change to branding, where it is not.



Read on AppleInsider

applezulu

It's been a long, slow burn on this one, but I think that when the expected pieces drop into place, this is going to be one of those instances where Apple leapfrogs ahead. A new, more intuitive and conversational Siri, who lives in a central Home Hub that immediately extends this new Siri to existing HomePods and Apple TVs, along with additional  Apple Home control screens, and suddenly, all your existing Home devices will "just work." 

The delays have been frustrating, but a Siri assistant that goes from its current state of arrested development to one that accurately and reliably responds to complex verbal instructions will be better in the end than one that went through incremental but still significantly flawed improvements over the past several years. Using LLM AI to power that is more useful and impressive than the LLM chatbots that have gotten all the hype while producing sub-par, hallucinatory results. 

In addition to controlling Apple Home more intuitively, an advanced Siri assistant could also do things like give you a verbal news and weather update in the morning, using content sources you've actually paid for in Apple News+ and other subscribed providers, and then save articles for further reading based on your preferences, or on conversational queries or requests you've made during Siri's summary. For instance, Siri is verbally giving you a morning news overview and references a Washington Post article on a pending piece of legislation.You interrupt the summary and say, "let me read that article later," Siri says "ok," bookmarks it in a daily news folder, and without missing a beat, continues on with the summary. Alternatively, you interrupt and ask Siri to go into more depth on that story during the briefing, or ask if there are other sources covering the same thing. All this would be possible with a well-designed Siri AI, and, unlike the competition, could be built around paid content. This would create something that's actually useful, isn't isn't hallucinatory, and doesn't require stealing someone else's work to be viable. 

lukei

Like him or loathe him, Elon has shown that you can catch up pretty quickly if you have the money and are willing to throw it at AI. I don’t use Grok but the xAI hardware cluster tech is stunning. 

However the real challenge now is that the exceptional people in AI are being tied into incentive plans by the other players. Apple also consistently shows that it fails to integrate high level execs into its structure. Add in that the other CEOs in this space are far more product led and indeed charismatic than Cook or indeed most of the senior leadership team and this adds up to a big issue for Apple.

I don’t hold out much hope for Siri. It’s been unfit for purposes for years. 

applezulu

lukei said:

Like him or loathe him, Elon has shown that you can catch up pretty quickly if you have the money and are willing to throw it at AI. I don’t use Grok but the xAI hardware cluster tech is stunning. 

However the real challenge now is that the exceptional people in AI are being tied into incentive plans by the other players. Apple also consistently shows that it fails to integrate high level execs into its structure. Add in that the other CEOs in this space are far more product led and indeed charismatic than Cook or indeed most of the senior leadership team and this adds up to a big issue for Apple.

I don’t hold out much hope for Siri. It’s been unfit for purposes for years. 

Fortunately, it’s never been a winner to expect Apple’s success to come from them being more like their competitors. 

Apple’s biggest blunder with AI was making a FOMO-based premature announcement about it last year. It appears in spite of that mistake, they’re once again being more deliberative and intentional about taking the time to create something actually useful, rather than the flawed first-to-market novelty artificial intelligence products being delivered by those “charismatic” competitors. 

LLM AI creates output that simulates and mimics human language. Because humans are hard-wired to see human faces even in rocks and clouds where there are none, these charismatic CEOs have been able to hype their defective, unfinished alpha test AI products as near sentient miracles that they aren’t. In fact, the brute force probability models they’ve developed aren’t even capable of ever becoming the near sentient thinking AI they pretend it is. They’re barking up the wrong tree. 

A supercomputer fed the rules of chess can use brute force to calculate probabilities of all the possible moves in a chess game in order to defeat a chess master. Yet, a supercomputer fed all the information on the internet, all the words in multiple languages and all the published books and scientific research cannot use brute force to calculate all the probabilities to produce a better ten-page term paper than a reasonably bright undergraduate college student. The college student has absorbed a tiny fraction of the data and is powered by the calories in a pizza, but can produce a paper with accurate and relevant citations and writing sufficiently original to avoid plagiarism. Those charismatic CEOs have plans to build bigger computers that will suck up even more energy to brute force better simulations, but they’ll never produce what they’re hyping with their the same-but-more approach. They’ll continue to fool lots of people, because people often think they see Jesus’ face on their toast, but it’s still just burnt toast. 

So if Apple takes a different approach and produces a Siri model that provides reasonably accurate and useful information with no claims of sentience, Apple will be up for the win. 

mplsp

Hopefully HomeKit (aka Apple Home) will finally develop into something truly useful. It had some nice features when it was introduced (easy pairing, better security,) but was limited by lack of compatibility, a more limited feature set, significantly higher device costs and limited availability. All these made HomeKit a bit of an orphan in the IoT space. I think the advent of Matter has helped and it seems these issues are finally getting remedied.

dewme

My hopes for Apple Home are very modest mainly because I've given up on it ever becoming anything more than what looks like a summer intern's first coding project. The UI on the Mac is atrocious and obviously developed prior to the summer intern learning about responsive design. That must be a sophomore level course. Why aren't Scenes wrapped like Rooms are when the Home Screen screen is resized? Maybe Scenes should be treated like a room? If you narrow the Home Screen enough, narrower than when clipping occurs, a scroll bar appears which gets you into a room-like behavior. Maybe I'm being nitpicky but it's been like this for years. Apple should have handed this off to a real development  team a couple of years ago.

In any case, if Apple would simply allow me to remotely manage firmware updates on the Apple TV like they do with HomePods, but in a much better way from a UX perspective, I would be happy with the Home app even if it never did anything more. I'm not looking for a full blown MDM solution, I just want it to see them provide a tiny bit of useful functionality that replaces something that is currently tedious.