south hearth
Trying to understand if Home Assistant Green can do what I need before purchasing one.
What I want to achieve is: two different user’s iPhones in the same physical home, on the same WiFi, controlling the same set of smart lights (a combination of Philips Hue, Lutron and IKEA with an Ethernet smart bridge for each) with the same set of voice commands (e.g. “Hey Siri, movie time”). Is Home Assistant Green an adequate device to enable this?
Background: we used to have the above functionality work by adding all three hubs to the Apple Home app on one iPhone, sharing the home with another user’s iPhone, and that was it. To edit scenes, add accessories etc. it was enough to change settings in the “master” Home, and it would propagate to the other iPhone. Never had any sort of Home Pod or Apple TV or whatever, only the individual smart light bridges for each light brand.
As of Fall 2025, Apple forced a Home architecture update which made sharing an Apple Home impossible without buying a “home hub”, which they of course suggest should be either Apple TV or Apple HomePod. No clear way to revert the update, plus the entire reason to update was that the support for the previous version was ending.
I’m open to buying a “home hub” but would like to avoid Apple (out of spite for them breaking a perfectly functional product and offering to “solve” the problem by buying one more device from them, and out of concern that this will happen again). I would also want to avoid Google, Amazon and others who mine data out of my private home audio environment. Which is how I found Home Assistant Green. But will it do what I need? Halp! And thanks in advance!
tawdry grail