As any good smart home platform should, Apple’s HomeKit platform allows for the sending of push notifications for a variety of accessory types from the native Home app. These notifications provide a way for us to use our smart devices to keep us apprised of important events - and the not so important ones too.

All of the notifications on offer in the Home app are defined per-user, which means that each authorized member of an Apple Home can choose how they want to set up their notifications. This is generally a good thing as it means each person only needs to get notifications they care about, and other user’s changing their preferences won’t affect anyone else.

The downside is that some of these notifications are on by default, and the less tech savvy household members may need to be helped to turn them off since it can’t be done centrally by the owner of the home. In this guide we’ll take a look at the various notifications on offer, how to configure them, the limitations of the Home app, and some useful day-to-day examples showing where each can be useful.

What Accessories Can Send Notifications

There are a few general classes of devices that have notification abilities. These are generally the things you’d expect, with one exception that puzzles me a little - blinds. This is due to being lumped in with ‘windows’ as well. I suppose you might want to be notified if a blind opens or closes, and it’s always good to have options.

In order to receive these notifications when you are away from the home network, you’ll need a home hub. This is an always-on Apple device that can act as a central control point for your HomeKit accessories and automations and provides a secure connection to iCloud in order for the notifications to be sent to your personal devices over the internet.

Accessories Categories with Notifications

Cameras & Doorbells
Blinds & Windows
Doors
Locks
Sensors

HomeKit Notification Filters

In almost all cases the Home app allows each user to filter when notifications for a specific accessory are sent based on time and presence. These two options look very similar to the conditional filters available for automations. I’m going to call this out here as it applies the same to each notification category below.

When you turn the Activity Notifications setting for any accessory, you’ll get these two options: Time and People.

Time filters allow you to define when you want to be notified by that particular accessory. This can be limited to day, night, or a specific time period every day. The day and night options are dynamic and vary based on the season and your home’s location.

People options can be based on whether that specific user is home or not, or whether there is anyone in the house or not. Unlike automations, this setting doesn’t allow you to filter to specific home members, it’s all or nothing.

Configure Notifications for Cameras

HomeKit camera support comes in two distinct flavors - basic support, and HomeKit Secure Video support. The basic cameras provide simple motion notifications and the ability to access a live view in HomeKit apps, but they can’t record to iCloud or perform any of the more useful object identification tasks. HomeKit Secure Video cameras allow for more nuanced notification settings, secure recording of events, and facial recognition of known people. Learn more about these features in a full guide to HomeKit Secure Video.

We’ll look at the full set of options, just keep in mind these will be cut down for basic cameras.

Camera notifications are the most complex in HomeKit. This is due to the fact that there is more to tell and because keeping them relevant is critical to being useful. No one wants to be spammed with useful camera motion events. Not only is this annoying, but it increases the likelihood of something important being ignored.

You can access the camera notification settings either from the gear icon when viewing a camera, or from the Home Settings.

From the Home app dashboard, tap the three dots in the top right corner.
Tap Home Settings.
Tap Cameras & Doorbells (scroll down is required).
Tap the camera to adjust notifications for.
Turn On Activity Notifications.
Select your Time and People filters.
Choose the event type to be notified about for this camera: A Clip is Recorded, Any Motion, or Specific Motion.
For the latter, you now need to select which object types to be alerted about below. People, Animals, Vehicles, or Packages.

Note for cameras there are two additional special notifications you can enable. To configure when a clip is recorded, you’ll need to access the camera’s full settings page using the gear icon available when viewing the camera.

Status Change notifications will alert you when the recording state is changed. This can be via a manual change to the Recording Options in the camera settings, or by an automatic change between Home and Away states based on when anyone is home or not.

Camera Offline notifications will alert you when the home hub determines that a camera is not responding. This can be prone to false alerts as any delay in the heartbeat can result in this being generated, even though the camera is working fine. This is more likely to happen if you are using a Wi-Fi-based home hub (like a HomePod) and you either have a lot of HomeKit Secure Video cameras, or you’re Wi-Fi network is not quite responsive enough.

Configure Notifications for Other Devices

screenshot of the apple home app Display As options for a contact sensor — Contact sensor display options

For all other accessory types that support notifications, there is little to configure outside of the Time and People filters discussed above. You can simply turn the notifications on or off. The two categories for Doors and Windows are actually subcategories of contact sensors. These are the sensors that can be placed on doors, windows, or other openable items to detect when they are open or closed.

In the accessory settings for these sensors there is a Display As setting. This determines the icon used for the device and if the sensor is shown under the general Sensors category or under Doors or Windows.

The effect of that settings is as follows:

Blinds & Windows

You’ll be notified whenever a device opens or closes.

This can be useful when you are out or at night to alert you to a window being opened.

Doors

You’ll be notified whenever the door is opened or closed.

As with windows, this is a useful security monitor for when you are out or at night. I use this one for when I’m away from the house as a matter of course, but not when I’m at home.

Locks

You’ll be notified when a smart lock is locked or unlocked.

This is useful for confirming the door is locked, especially when triggering it while away from the door. It’s also useful for alerting you to the door being unlocked. This one I prefer to leave active at all times rather than limiting it.

Sensors

This category covers all the other kinds of sensors that come up. This can include contact sensors as well where they haven’t been flagged as Doors or Windows. I use one of these on the pool gate to alert me if the kids try to go in there unsupervised.

Motion sensors also fall under this category. An obvious security benefit, but one you’ll likely want to limit to when you are out of the house. You may have specific approaches you could leave on at all times.

Other sensor types include leak sensors (like the Eve Water Guard) and smoke detectors. In those cases, it makes sense to leave the notifications on all the time.

Limitations of HomeKit Notifications

Outside of camera notifications, which can be quite specific to your needs, other accessory types are only on or off settings. While you can restrict when those notifications are sent, those options are also a little limited. The problem is that for events where there are two states, like open/close or lock/unlock, the notification will always be sent for both. I find that in many cases I only care about one of those things.

For example, I don’t need to know when a door is opened AND closed, I just want to know if it’s opened when it shouldn’t be. For situations where these events may be happening a lot, such as on my pool gate when we are actually using the pool, getting notified twice (open and close) every time someone goes through can get annoying.

Thankfully, you can mute HomeKit notifications for a short period of time from the notification list on your iPhone (either on the lock screen or by swiping down from the top). To do this:

Slide the notification list up or down to find any HomeKit notification.
Slide that notification to the left (don’t swipe, that will remove it).
Tap Options.
Select either Mute for One Hour or Mute for Today.

All notifications from the Home app will now be muted for that duration and will automatically resume afterwards. Note that this mutes ALL notifications from the Home app, not just the notification you chose, so use this with caution.

Can We Do More With Notifications?

While HomeKit Secure Video provides for rich, tailored notifications that are up there with the best in the industry, the rest of the notifications on offer are very basic. You may want to have smarter, more actionable notifications than what is on offer.

There are a couple of third-party apps that allow us to do this. Controller for HomeKit and PushCut both provide the ability to create custom notifications that can include multiple actions, dynamic data, and can be triggered from both HomeKit automations AND Siri shortcuts. Both of these options carry some cost, however, so you’ll need to consider if it’s worth the price of admission. You can check out our advanced notification guide to learn more about these options.

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