Anyone who wants to can now easily fill their entire home with Chinese smart home technology. Privacy remains a tricky issue, because most products need a direct ‘line’ with China. Including the products of Xiaomi, a name that as an economical smart home user you can hardly ignore. The Chinese market all kinds of products under different brand names, the design of which is often surprisingly similar to their much more expensive western counterparts. A problem is that sometimes it is hard to see what exactly works with which device or protocol. An update of the Yeelight app brings some more order into the chaos: Yeelight has made it easier to add all kinds of products from the Xiaomi universe to HomeKit. This applies to the Yeelight lamps, for example, but also to the Mi Desk Lamp.

Yeelight also available in the Netherlands
Yeelight will be an unknown name for many, but the products are simply on the shelves of Bol.com’s partners. They are not supplied by Bol.com itself, but by numerous partner companies that respond to the need for cheap smart home technology. If you are a fan of these products, you will soon be able to walk into the Xiaomi Mi Stores, which are already to be found everywhere in cities such as London and Paris. Amsterdam and Rotterdam will receive the first Mi Stores in the Netherlands. You’ll find the Mi Desk Lamp, bedside lamps and lamps that seem to have been produced by Philips, but are part of the ‘Xiaomi ecosystem’.

Yeelight is a Chinese startup that started in 2012 and was taken over by Xiaomi after the first production round. Since then, Yeelight has been operating largely independently for a number of years, although it is part of Xiaomi. Initially, the lamps were only for sale in Asia, but are increasingly finding their way to Europe, thanks to smart importers.

New in the update of the Yeelight app (version 3.1.75) is that now HomeKit is supported for the first time. This gives you the opportunity to add HomeKit devices to your smart home, as was already possible with the Mi Home and Aqara apps. If you have devices such as a Mi Lamp or Aqara Hub, you can add them immediately in the Yeelight app. For example, it’s about the:

Mi Desk Lamp Pro
Mi Desk Lamp 1S
Mi Bedside Lamp 2

These products are immediately suitable for HomeKit from the box. The app also automatically recognizes Yeelight’s own smart lamps, like this one:

Yeelight Colour Bulb (2nd generation)
Yeelight Tunable White Bulb (2nd generation)
Yeelight Light Strip Plus
Mi (Smart) Colour Bulb

Yeelight lamps work via WiFi
Previously, you could only add them via the Mi Home app, but that required an account for Mi Home. The Yeelight lamps did not require a bridge or hub because the Wi-Fi is already built in. Early this month, Yeelight released a HomeKit update for the Light Strip Plus and a few days later a similar update for the Mi Smart Colour Bulb and the Tunable White Smart Bulb. The manufacturer has promised that more HomeKit updates will be released in the third quarter of 2019, so that the complete range will eventually be suitable.

You don’t need a HomeKit code to add the bulbs, but that means you have to add them to Mi Home or the Yeelight app first. Then you can easily add them to HomeKit. In the event of any problems, you can close the app just as hard after installing the firmware update. After that, a pop-up will pop up asking you if you want to add the lamp to HomeKit.

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