HomeKit Finally Coming To LifeSmart

Chinese Smart Home brand LifeSmart look to be adding HomeKit to their lineup of smart products, including their hub, which is designed to corral many of their child devices, much in the same way that the Aqara hub does with its own child devices. In addition, it would appear from what we’ve been told by the folks over at smartapfel.de that the company’s Cololight modular lighting system will also get an upgrade to the Cololight Pro which will be HomeKit compatible once it’s released.

By way of an introduction to LifeSmart, way back when the idea for this website hadn’t even been dreamt up, LifeSmart was offering a series of products all designed to work with either wifi or their own SmartStation hubs, ranging from temperature/humidity sensors, colour bulbs, IR blasters, light strips, and even smart locks and light switches. While they weren’t officially HomeKit compatible, the accompanying LifeSmart app had a special beta function that would generate a HomeKit code, which would allow the hub to be added to HomeKit – albeit unofficially/uncertified. This would then allow most of the devices that went through the hub to be exposed to HomeKit, which is what I’m doing right now.

The beta software was pulled for some reason, but if you were already set up in HomeKit, it didn’t matter – only newcomers who had heard about this beta option but arrived after the beta option was removed, were unable to add their devices to HomeKit. You can check out our reviews and listings of some of the LifeSmart products HERE.

Although details are scant, it would now seem that LifeSmart has bitten the bullet and, as with many other Chinese-based companies, decided to hop on the HomeKit cart, with a banner at this years IFA in Berlin announcing as much.

We’ve had the LifeSmart Cololight here since January, and despite not having official HomeKit compatibility (we can as we’re still running the LifeSmart beta option) it does work fairly well with both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and it’s a nice ‘feature light’ for want of a better description. The Cololight uses one six-sided main tile, which seems to be the one with the ‘brains’ of the system, with other additional tiles all acting as slave devices once connected to the main tile. The team over at SmartApfel.de tell us they’ve spoken to LifeSmart at their IFA stand, and are told that the new Cololight Pro will be HomeKit compatible, but the current Cololight products will not be updated for HomeKit support. However, they did also state that anyone with current Cololight setups need only replace the ‘main tile’ with the forthcoming HomeKit compatible base unit, as the slave tiles will work with this updated pro version just the same.

Thanks to Smartapfel.de for the info.