5 Great Smart Home Accessories That Work With HomeKit Using Homebridge

Home app pairing process displayed on an iPhone
Home app pairing process displayed on an iPhone (Image credit: iMore)

It's taken some time, but the number of HomeKit-enabled accessories has grown to an extensive, diverse offering. That said, there are still many excellent smart home accessories that don't work with Apple HomeKit. But here's the thing: Some of those accessories can be made to work with Apple HomeKit — it just takes a bit of DIY magic and a handy little tool called Homebridge.

It all starts with Homebridge!

If you want to link up non-HomeKit-enabled smart products to your HomeKit-enabled setup, you're going to need to install Homebridge.

Homebridge is a NodeJS server that acts as a HomeKit-enabled bridge, connecting non-HomeKit-enabled products to HomeKit. Once you've set up a Homebridge server, you can download plugins for non-HomeKit-enabled devices in order to access them with the iOS Home app and control them using your voice with Siri.

I've put together a detailed guide to help you get Homebridge up and running. You can check that out here:

How to connect incompatible accessories to HomeKit using Homebridge

Once you've got Homebridge running, come on back to this post to learn which smart home accessories you should get to put Homebridge to the test.

Thoughts?

Are you planning to add some non-HomeKit-enabled accessories to your HomeKit setup (you rebel!)? Have you already played around with Homebridge? Did you hit any snags getting everything set up? Give me a shout in the comments or over on Twitter; I'm curious to hear about your experience.

Mikah Sargent

Mikah Sargent is Senior Editor at Mobile Nations. When he's not bothering his chihuahuas, Mikah spends entirely too much time and money on HomeKit products. You can follow him on Twitter at @mikahsargent if you're so inclined.