My advice for anyone starting a smart home is to keep it simple at first

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My advice for anyone starting a smart home is to keep it simple at first.

Start with a reliable hub and a few devices that solve real problems in your daily life. Then gradually add automations as you learn how your devices work together.

For example, I use Aqara devices with Apple Home and Matter. The combination of Aqara sensors, relays and automations makes it possible to control many things without needing complicated setups.

My biggest tip is: don’t try to automate everything on the first day. Start with one useful automation, test it, and then build on it.

A simple and reliable smart home is better than a complicated system that is difficult to maintain.

StarterTips

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@bakikavurka Totally agree with this approach—starting “small but meaningful” is the fastest way to end up with a smart home you actually enjoy living with.

Aqara is a solid fit for that style because you can begin with basic control + a couple of sensors, then grow into scenes and automations as you learn what matters day-to-day (and keep it easy to maintain). The Aqara Home app also makes it straightforward to organize devices, build Scenes for batch actions, and create Automations for the “one useful automation at a time” workflow you described.

And for folks mixing Aqara + Apple Home + Matter: once your Aqara hub supports Matter, child devices connected to it can be exposed into Matter ecosystems like Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, SmartThings, Home Assistant, etc.—which keeps the system flexible without forcing a complicated setup up front.

Curious—what was your first “high-impact” automation that made you think “okay, this is worth it”?

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For me, one of the first high-impact automations was controlling my garage door with an Aqara T2 relay.

Being able to open and close the garage door remotely, without having to physically reach the control, made a real difference in my daily life.

What I really liked was that I could integrate it into my Aqara and Apple Home setup and control it together with my other smart home devices.

It was a simple automation, but it immediately showed me how useful a smart home can be when it solves a real everyday problem.

Since then, I’ve been gradually adding more Aqara devices and automations instead of trying to automate everything at once.

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I agree with this! Starting out can be really overwhelming when you see all the shiny and fancy automations everyone else does. One thing that helped me is remembering not every automation has to be useful. If setting things up is getting complicated, stop and make something small and fun. I got frustrated setting up a fancy washer/dryer notification system…so now when I hit a button my living room turns into disco lights. When I was trying to set up a music pipeline and hit a wall…the system now plays a jingle for my cat every time he uses the litterbox. I work hard enough at my job, it’s important to remember your smarthome can be fun too.