What’s new for HomeKit in iOS 12 public beta 2

Today, Apple released the second public beta version of iOS 12 to testers just a couple of days after the developer release. Unfortunately, there is only one change that we have spotted so far by digging through the home app, and it may have been something that we overlooked during our rundown of beta 1.

When viewing a live camera feed within the home app, a slightly modified version of the microphone icon appears in the bottom right hand corner of the view. In previous versions of iOS, the microphone icon was surrounded by a white circle, which helped indicate that it could be tapped on. This white circle would change to an orange circle to indicate whether or not the microphone was active, along with the removal of the strike-through line across the microphone. In public beta 2, the circle around the microphone has been removed, just leaving the microphone itself. When tapped on, the strike-through line is removed, serving as the only indication as to whether not the microphone is active. The room label “bug” that was present in the previous release is still in beta 2, which may indicate that this may not be a bug at all. Since the room labels are not present when viewing devices in a specific room within the home app, it does make sense to not have the room name appear on each device tile as the room name is already displayed at the top left hand side of the tab. While most beta releases typically feature less and less changes throughout the beta process, we will continue to provide any updates that we find.