Aqara Home

Since instituting a solid firewall, the Aqara app says everything is disconnected, though it sees/shows all my devices, they all just appear disconnected. I have about 30 of their devices, which I’m leaning towards selling to someone who doesn’t care. I got into homekit before firewalls, which explains why i have any of their devices. I find this constant linking to servers outside the apple home hubs and apple home servers, more than irksome. Local, in home is what i am after. I have cybersecurity concerns, such as iOS devices being used as botnets, for example. Since the US has poor to no consumer protection and interest in developing a cybersecurity mindset thru education of their citizens, the EU seems to be the only game in town. When i first added Aqara devices i didn’t have a good enough firewall, but now that i have traffic allowed to only. A few countries, I see i have to part ways with Aqara. They make some of the best products, and are affordable, but their need for constant data link to china makes me have brand hate. Homekit mode has become useless over the past few years. Also, beware of camera features, using them uploads the videos to Aqara servers.

I bought my first smart home devices about 2 years ago, not expecting much as technology hadn’t really impressed me (especially not inexpensive tech). So I gave Aqara a shot, buying a few switches and sensors for a great deal on prime day, and I just couldn’t believe how well everything worked. Most manufacturers make similar products to compete, but Aqara takes those similar products and improves on them giving the customer exactly what they want at a great price, and most importantly it all works! I have 55 Aqara accessories in my house, from wall switches (with & w/o neutral wires) to motion, contact & light sensors to curtain drivers, cameras & locks, I have been extremely impressed with how everything works. The app ties all of this together so well and allows for so much control & functionality that anyone would be able to setup a cutting edge smart home in any of the big-3 ecosystems with ease, whether a novice or grizzled home automation elder. Aqara support is extremely responsive & they fix issues quickly, as well as incorporating good new ideas from users into the product. Maybe you can tell by now, but I love Aqara & I highly recommend their products to anyone!

They replaced the nice icon they had with this hideous ugly icon I now have to constantly look at on my home screen. The same update changed the large, easy to press with tiny controls. Adding a temperature sensor added a nice “Bedroom environment” info panel to the top of the app home screen. After adding another temperature sensor and trying to change the room here, the entire feature permanently disappeared. All time is in 24-hour format which no one in the US uses unless you’re in law enforcement or military. There is no dark mode, and you can’t set the app background to a normal color but instead are forced to choose from these bizarre wallpaper photos. Start time and stop time in automation doesn’t work in a logical or user friendly way. The app has an always-on alarm setting that you can’t shut off even if you want to. So I have to set it to “if the front door is open for 24 hours” to effectively disable it. The old version of the app at least had a decent name for this weird feature, now it’s even more unfriendly with the name “7*24 guard”. Randomly, error messages in the app will be in Chinese. I can’t add custom actions to an alarm going off. For example, I’d like to turn on the lights when the alarm goes off but that’s not possible. Despite all that, I still give it four stars. Overall it does its job pretty well. I wish very badly they’d add webhooks to the automation actions.