Xmas Comes Early With HomeKit Support For Twinkly

It would seem that Christmas has come earlier than expected for many owners of Twinkly lighting products, with an update that adds certified HomeKit integration to many of the company’s devices. Italian company Twinkly, in case you don’t know, started off making smart Christmas tree lights (Strings), but quickly expanded to other types of lighting, including Cluster, Curtain, Icicle, Flex, and Line products.

Now with the latest firmware update (2.8.3), many of the company’s products gain the long-promised HomeKit support, although the update doesn’t apply to their very first Strings, only those designated as Gen II products, along with Twinkly Plus. Gen II products include the aforementioned lighting products, which all gain basic HomeKit support that allows the lights to be controlled via HomeKit or Siri, for brightness, solid colours, as well as on and off. It currently doesn’t support multicolour scenes which the Twinkly app is capable of, although a future update may allow this, in the same manner that Onvis, with their multicolour Kameleon LED strips, allows the user to create multicolour presets that are then exposed to HomeKit as ‘Scenes’.

In many ways, given that the Holiday Season is just around the corner, the timing for some new Christmas lighting is perfect (we’re sure it’s not a coincidence…), along with Black Friday sales fast approaching, there couldn’t be a better time to upgrade your Christmas tree by adding some ‘smarts’.