B&D Smart Garage Access

B&D promotes Siri voice control as a feature of its smart garage door system, including the ability to say “Hey Siri, open the garage door”. Unfortunately, the implementation has a major limitation that isn’t made clear in the marketing. The supplied Siri Shortcuts work normally — except when connected to CarPlay and driving. Ask Siri to open the garage as you approach home and Siri refuses to run the B&D app/shortcut because it isn’t compatible with the CarPlay driving environment. This rather defeats the purpose. The ONE place where hands-free voice control of a garage door is most useful is in the car, approaching your garage. Apple supports garage-door control through Siri and CarPlay when properly integrated with Apple Home/HomeKit. The problem appears to be B&D/Automatic Technology’s implementation, which relies on app-based Siri Shortcuts without providing the integration required for this key use case. I contacted B&D Technical Support and was simply told that the system is not CarPlay compatible, with no timeline for when this will be addressed. If Siri control is advertised as a feature of a smart garage-door opener, this significant limitation should be clearly disclosed before purchase. Until B&D provides proper Apple Home/HomeKit, Matter or CarPlay-compatible integration, iPhone users should be aware that the advertised Siri functionality may not work when they need it most.

The app does everything it needs to, but not much more. There’s so much potential in the smart home space, I hope B&D have some serious innovation going on behind the scenes. The obvious one is geofencing. How nice it would be to not need to rattle around the side pocket of your car door to find the garage remote on your way up the driveway. If we can have cars that learn our garage door remote signal and emit it as we cross a geofence boundary, why can’t a wifi connected app like this one do the same when the app user’s device crosses a geographic boundary?

This update works way better than the last. I still had a few occasions when it won’t connect until I close and reopen app. But compared to the last update this is poles apart. The original app still gets a 10/10. This prolly 7/10. Fix the connection taking long or not at all until close and reopen. Then full marks is warranted.