Originally Posted by
SouthboHomeKitGuy
I'd encourage you to give the Caseta system a try. Given Lutron's hardware legacy, they really are best-in-class. Their customer support is also top-notch. They very quickly replaced a switch that went bad on me and it showed up on my doorstep in just a couple of days.
I too would love to see Lutron get more aggressive about supporting the HomeKit API, but everybody is taking baby steps here. Companies have a vested interest in protecting their own architectures and moving toward a common API is always something that happens slowly. I do believe that the HomeKit API will become a dominant force in the marketplace given the popularity of iOS, the tendency for Apple to make complex things easy, and the strength of the architecture itself.
So, what is needed now, is for Lutron to do a good job taking advantage of this new opportunity. Home automation is not yet in the mainstream. HomeKit can take it there probably more than any other single architecture because it lets people enter the game at a very low price point. Lutron is absolutely best-in-class hardware for in-wall switches and they can do much to help HomeKit's growth by legitimizing it as something beyond a tinkerer's playground. Right now I'd give them a "B" on how well they're supporting it. The integration is fairly tight, but there are gaps.
The Lutron software does not support native HomeKit scenes & automation and some of the hardware isn't fully integrated (e.g., the Pico remote issue we've been discussing). What appears to be the core issue is that Lutron is allowing HomeKit to control the Lutron hardware through the smart bridge, but not the other way around; one cannot (yet?) use Lutron hardware to drive HomeKit. If they can figure out how to enable this, they will quickly become the de facto platform on which to build HomeKit-based smart homes.
The potential for them is huge and goes way beyond the table scraps of what things like the recently announced partnership with Sonos can do for their revenue growth. Just think how powerful voice + button controlled scene based lighting can be! I have to imagine that much of Lutron's profit is made on the switches, not the controllers. It's a "give away the razors and sell the blades" business model. If they can get comfortable with Apple and third party apps being the controllers, they can sell a TON of switches!
I just hope they're listening... (he said knowing that Lutron employees do monitor these threads)