Good - but could easily be so much better – Lutron App Review

I installed the Caseta system in our house a couple of weeks ago. Installation was a really smooth experience: the system really simplifies wiring (effectively, turning three-pole switches back into single pole switches, controlled by wireless remotes), allows for lots of customisation (like being able to control multiple lights in a room with one button press), and is a great improvement on all the manual switches we had before. Overall, I’m impressed – but there are a couple of seemingly obvious things that have been overlooked. Firstly, my partner and I both have iPhones – but Lutron’s geofencing isn’t smart enough to tell when one of us is home and the other is out, and only switch lights on if we’re both out, for example. If I turn the option on and leave, all the lights go off, leaving my husband in darkness. Not all that smart, right? There’s a workaround if you have a Nest device that can be set to determine whether someone’s home, but if you don’t have one, this isn’t an option. If our thermostat can get this right, why can’t Lutron? And then there’s the Siri/HomeKit integration. I love being able to tell Siri to “turn the kitchen lights on” or “set the living room lights to 50%” – but why doesn’t HomeKit see the Scenes I’ve set up in the Lutron app, too? If I tell Siri to “set the lights to Evening”, she tells me she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Again, there’s a workaround: you can duplicate these Scenes as new Scenes in HomeKit – but it seems like an oversight. And, at time of writing, the Lutron app isn’t supported for the Shortcuts app, either. Finally, we need a better way to make “tweaks” to Scenes that have already been set up. Live editing isn’t possible, and neither is it possible to “grab” the way the lights are set in a room and store that as a Scene. This means, if I decide I want to make changes, that I have to go into each device, one by one, make a note of the dimming level, then manually enter it in the Scene afterwards. This should be a simple fix in a future update, but will it happen? A little more thought would make this a killer app and system. Right now, I’d say we’re at 3 out of 5.
Review by MikeCooperAVL on Lutron App.