Integrated Smart Home Controls
For serious home automation enthusiasts, HomeKit has long been superior in many ways to competing platforms like Google Home, even despite the smaller selection of compatible devices. There’s been native iOS support for HomeKit since at least iOS 10, including the ability to not only easily control devices from a built-in app and Control Center widget, but also to set up some pretty sophisticated automations.
Meanwhile, platforms like Google Home and Amazon Alexa have relied primarily on voice control, which is great if you’re somebody who wants to talk to your lights all the time, but sometimes you just want to push a button. With Android 11, however, Google seems to be trying to catch up by also adding new widgets to help users control their Google Home smart devices from anywhere within the Android operating system.