Good HomeKit Management Tool, but Matching Hardware Lacks Functionality

The Elgato Eve app is by far one of the best HomeKit system management apps. The interfaces are very quick to load and the app is very responsive, both in terms of HomeKit devices responding to commands it sends and in terms of the UI of the app itself on iOS. There is also a moderate level of configurability, with a decent icon set for devices and the way it uses photos as blurry backgrounds is cool (you can take a pictures of your rooms and set them as the background for the room’s views in the app and it isn’t annoying or tacky because the app blurs the photo).

A couple nit-picky things about the app would be the lack of trigger configuration support, but none of the hardware manufacturer’s apps seem to support that yet. The way the app handles scene execution is also pretty inelegant compared to the rest of the app, like it was tacked on as an afterthought. This seems to be true of manufacturer apps in general as well though, I have yet to find one where scene execution isn’t tucked away into a menu or other not very logical view/location in the app.

Also, for some reason my door/window sensor still calls itself a “Door” and displays the door icon in the status line even though I’ve changed the “Used For” parameter to the large four-paned window icon in the accessory settings view.

Eve’s hardware, however, leaves a lot to be desired. I own the outdoor weather station and one door/window sensor.

The door/window sensor looks nice (much more aesthetically pleasing than competitive products), installs easily and is relatively inexpensive. However, at this time it doesn’t support HomeKit triggers, which renders a sensor fairly useless as a component in your SmartHome system. I bought one to try it out and installed it on a large window in my living room, intending to trigger a scene that turns off my thermostat if the window is opened, but without trigger support I can’t do that. As others have pointed out in reviews, pretty much everything you would want to do with a door or window sensor as part of a SmartHome system isn’t possible without triggers.

Elgato has promised an app and firmware update soon that will provide trigger support for the devices (I’m not sure about actually setting triggers up in the app though, so you’ll probably still need a third party app for that). I contacted their support team to find out when I could expect the update last week, and the response I received didn’t commit to a release date but did state that developers are working on it and that it will hopefully be soon. They’ve also said the fix will require an app update, which they released yesterday, so it is possible the firmware update is close behind.

The outdoor weather station is OK. It provides temperature, humidity and air pressure. You can export the data from the app and view basic graphs of it in the app with minimal manipulation of the graphs (changing view timeframes, comparing the current data to the previous hour/day/week/month). I only have the eve outdoor station, but I also have the netatmo outdoor station that is sold packaged with an indoor device and I like the netatmo weather experience better overall even though it isn’t HomeKit compatible (although there is a homebridge plug-in that works fairly well, I don’t have a stable homebridge host working yet). Netatmo’s app is able to focus on weather related features only and is a bit more robust in that regard, and it also has a web interface and nice iPad app. Netatmo also has a rain gauge and will be releasing a wind gauge soon.

My hope is that the upcoming firmware updates will add support for triggers based on characteristics of the weather station as well as the door/window sensor.

Kirn Malinus about Eve for Matter & HomeKit