Google has made the Android version of its Home APIs available in public developer beta, with the iOS version to follow in the coming months. 

The Home APIs were announced at Google I/O last year, along with a Home runtime that can be used to access over 600M devices, Google's hubs and Matter infrastructure.

During the public beta of the APIs, developers can begin building and testing their apps with up to 100 users in preparation for the general availability launch of the Home APIs later this year.

There are three APIs in the collection - Device and Structure, Commissioning and Automation. The Device and Structure API can be used to control and manage the devices already connected to Google Home, such as Matter light bulbs or the Nest Learning Thermostat.

Matter is an open standard for smart home technology that lets your device work with any Matter-certified ecosystem using a single protocol.

Google says the Device and Structure API enables local control, broad device reach, and support for Matter custom clusters. Typical uses might be turning on the lights automatically before the food delivery driver arrives.

The Commissioning API can be used to set up Matter devices in an app or the Home app or directly with Fast Pair on Android, without the need to create a new Matter fabric.

The final element is the Automation API which can be used to create and manage home automations in an app using Google Home's automation engine and intelligent signals. Automations can be triggered by device signals from the home such as occupancy events from motion sensors, mode changes from appliances, or media events from a smart TV.

They can also use Google's intelligence signals like home and away, which fuses together signals from devices across the home to create a more accurate presence detection.

The Google Home APIs for Android provide a unified API surface that developers can use to interact with the state of entities in a user's home. These entities can describe devices and non-device information associated with a user's structure and rooms.

The Home APIs define several types of entities, starting with structures that represent a home that contains rooms and devices. Rooms are part of a structure and contain devices, and devices implement traits containing attributes, conform to types, emit events, and respond to commands. Automations are part of a structure and use home metadata and devices to automate tasks in the home.

The Home APIs are written in Kotlin and provide an idiomatic Kotlin interface that uses Flow to manage state and subscription. The Android Home APIs are available in beta now.

More Information

Google Home APIs

Matter Website

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