App Profile: Aqara Home

johnrcornell

Rating: 4/5

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.

Johnney55

Rating: 1/5

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.

E-Baus

Rating: 3/5

App is generally fine to work with. I’m able to navigate through it without much issue, and have several temperature sensors running in various locations of my residence. Overall I don’t have many issues with the app except for the blasted 24 hour time format. I emailed Aqara support back in August ‘23 requesting that they add a 12 hour time format to their sensor graphs. It’s really annoying to visualize and mentally convert from 24-to-12 hour format when practically every American operates in 12 hour format. Rep “Cecilia” said that she’d pass it along to their dev team - but apparently it isn’t that high priority of a change request since that suggestion was never actualized. Not to mention I see that a user from 4 years ago requested the same time format update. Would update the review to 5 stars if they deployed this simple feature request.