Connecting Google Home and Fitness Apps via the Home APIs: A Comment on Google’s Decline and Updating of Eve Hubs

smart home developers may not be the only ones who have access. In the blog post, Matt Van Der Staay, engineering director at Google Home, said the Home APIs could be used to connect smart home devices to fitness or delivery apps. “You can build a complex app to manage any aspect of a smart home, or simply integrate with a smart device to solve pain points — like turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives.”

After announcing that it was bringing an app to Android in 2022, Eve is close to launching it and may do so by the fall. Android users will be able to control Eve’s smart home products natively — including smart plugs, smart lights, and smart shades. Energy management features are not present in the Matter platforms they work with, so they’ll be able to access them. Prior to Matter, Eve devices only worked with Apple HomeKit and were only controllable on iOS devices.

He said that there were ideas like a workout app you could use to keep busy, and a vacation rental app you could use to make your home better for guests, by adjusting the temperature and lights.

Van Der Staay said smart lock maker Yale is using the Automation API to allow its users to set lights to turn on when the front door is unlocked at night through its Yale Access app. However, Kattukaran said that while the company plans to make all devices available via the Home APIs, “V1.0 may not include a limited set of devices (for example, cameras).”

Several major smart home platforms are supporting Matter, along with hundreds of device manufacturers.

Additionally, Kattukaran said Google will upgrade all of its existing home hubs — which include Nest Hub (second-gen), Nest Hub Max, and Google Wifi — with a new ability called Home runtime.

“With this update, all hubs for Google Home will be able to directly route commands from any app built with Home APIs (such as the Google Home app) to a customer’s Matter device locally, when the phone is on the same Wi-Fi network as the hub,” said Kattukaran. This means you should see “significant latency improvements using local control via a hub for Google Home,” he added.

The company said in a press release that the app will allow Matter to be added, controlled and automated directly and without any proprietary connection mechanism or fragile cloud to cloud integrations. “For the growing range of Matter-enabled Eve devices, Eve for Android will provide advanced functionality, such as measurement of energy consumption and generation for Eve Energy solutions, autonomous heating schedules for the smart thermostat Eve Thermo or Adaptive Shading for roller blinds in the Eve Blinds Collection.”

This week, the company announced it was opening up the Home app to other developers. Eve was an early access partner with google and is using the API to continue developing the app, which has been delayed due to external dependencies.