Those looking for an affordable HomeKit Secure Video (HSV) camera could be in luck: Aqara has announced that its long-promised G2H camera will support Apple’s privacy-focused standard from launch. Although pricing isn’t yet known, the company is known for budget-friendly products.
It follows news that the G2 Camera Hub will also be HomeKit compatible …
HomeKit News reports that there have been rumors of a Q1 release for the G2H, but this now seems far from certain.
Indeed, Aqara specifically and companies promising HomeKit support generally aren’t really known for accurate launch dates, so when it will launch is anyone’s guess right now. What we do know is that the likely affordable HomeKit Secure Video camera will stream at 1080p and include an SD card slot for local capture.
With the Coronavirus pandemic affecting production in China, most production has been inevitably and understandably pushed back, with the G2H being no exception.
As posted today by Aqara on their forum, the company state;
“G2H is supposed to be launched later this year (2020). It will support HomeKit Secure Video and will not be limited by Mi Home app: Aqara Home and Apple Home will be also supported.”
The Logitech Circle 2 cameras were the first to get HSV, which we found to be a privacy win while lacking some features.
HomeKit Secure Video is designed to address the main security weakness with most of today’s smarter cameras. In order to do things like detect people and recognize faces, most cameras upload your video stream to the cloud and carry out the analysis there. That means that unencrypted video is stored on someone else’s server, representing a tasty target for hackers.
With HSV, all of the people, animal, and vehicle detection is performed locally, on your own iPad, HomePod or Apple TV, and only encrypted video is sent to Apple’s cloud servers.
