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Yeelight, one of the companies under the Xiaomi umbrella, has announced via the Weibo Social media platform that their 2nd gen colour and tuneable white smart bulbs, as well as the Mi LED Smart bulb and Yeelight Light Strip are all HomeKit compatible. The Mi Bulb, despite having the Mi logo, is actually manufactured by Yeelight, as are many other lighting products branded Mi or Mijia. Although compatibility isn’t available yet, this is the first time that Yeelight has officially announced their intention to add HomeKit support to these devices, with mention of the updates to these products projected to be released in Q3 of 2019.

All the aforementioned products have actually been showing signs of getting HomeKit support for the last few months; when you add these devices to the Mi Home app, the first screen states that the product you’re adding is homeKit compatible, and although it asks if you’d subsequently like to add the device to your HomeKit Home, nothing happens.

Yeelight is probably one of the best light bulb manufacturers in China right now, with an excellent build quality for their bulbs and brightness and colour rendering that can give Philips Hue a run for its money (IOHO), so if HomeKit does arrive as is claimed, the field is open wide again for low-cost lighting.

We’ve got some Yeelight bulbs, as well as a strip and a Mi LED bulb, already installed, but as expected, there are currently no firmware updates available. We’ll be doing regular tests on the off chance HomeKit support is released earlier than promised and will update this post as necessary.