Aqara Home 4+

It works... more or less. The price is definitely right, but there are ragged edges. For starters, there is no native iPad landscape mode. For those of us who use iPad with a magic keyboard, that’s a deal-breaker right out of the gate. There is a (somewhat confusing) option which purports to sync Aqara names and rooms with Homekit - it doesn’t, at least, not consistently. Part of the onboarding process is to figure out what the new device is called in HK and in what room it was initially installed, then rename it and relocate it. Not a huge deal, just an annoyance.

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.

I’d like to switch to my favorite TV channels using the IR function on the Aqara Hub M2 (via HomePod mini and Siri Shortcuts) “Hey Siri, put on Tennis Channel” I’m able to save each number on my remote as a button and create a scene made up of each button press separated by a delay… scene example for channel 217: “2” > 1s delay > “1” > 1s delay > “7” I say “Hey Siri, put on Tennis Channel” and my TV goes to the channel of the first number entered (channel 2) due to the one second minimum delay required by IR scenes in the Aqara Home app… a simple solution is to add time delay options shorter than one second, such as a half second, quarter of a second or even an eighth of a second… please fix this and unlock this capability for all Hub M2 users! note: I bought the Aqara Hub M2 specifically to see if I could have this capability since I read it can function as an IR blaster and use scenes with Siri Shortcuts… one star rating is simply to increase the odds of Aqara customers and employees seeing this review and being heard and making this capability possible