Insteon has announced that its working hard to integrate with Apple HomeKit and unveiled a new app that is coming soon to iOS and Android.



The company is taking several steps to improve its home automation products under new CEO Rob Lilleness. "I came to Insteon because I believe so strongly that we are positioned to be an important player in the Internet of Things (IoT) space", says Lilleness. "With our new board of directors and management team in place, and with amazing new advisors like the founder of Sonos, we’ve kicked off a new chapter at Insteon, committed to our mission of delivering truly world-class lighting and electrical-control products and services."



Insteon says it is making substantial investments to its cloud-to-cloud service which will improve its ability to work will with other products, platforms, and services. This includes Apple HomeKit.



Apple fans will be happy to hear that we are investing in research and development into the updated HomeKit ecosystem. One of the things we respect most about HomeKit is Apple's commitment to security, but HomeKit’s initial architecture proved costly and challenging for the industry to adopt. Consequently, it didn’t allow us to give our customers the user experience (and level of responsiveness) that we thought they deserved. We are now working hard to integrate with Apple’s updated approach so we can be as effortlessly compatible with Apple HomeKit as we are with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and others.



The company is also developing a new mobile app which has been reimagined from the ground up and features a new look, fast response times, a simplified way to create and control scenes, Sunrise and Sunset offsets, and much more.



We are coding the new app in a framework called React Native that enables us to use a single codebase for both the iOS and Android apps, so both apps will share the same functionality. Equally important, as you give us feedback, this framework improves our ability to deliver app updates more frequently. We’ve included a few screenshots from the new app below.



The app will be available to beta test in about a month, you can sign up to be a beta tester here.



Insteon has also taken steps to improve its customers service. Support wait times are now down from nearly 30 minutes to an average of three minutes.



Finally, the company promises new and exciting things ahead which will work with Insteon products sold today and which will use dependable dual-band technology.



Speaking of compatibility, we’re proud of the fact that Insteon switches sold over 10 years ago can work with modern-day voice assistants that hadn’t even been conceived of back then! We know that it’s important to you that we do things “the right way” (so you don’t have to upgrade to new light switches the way you might upgrade to a new smartphone every few years). You don’t want a house full of disposable gadgets reliant on technology fads, and neither do we. We continue to be committed to this approach as a core value of our culture, so you can feel confident that you’ve chosen the right products for your home.



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