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