News from the IT community on October 10th: According to a post published yesterday (October 9th) by @itspdfu, Apple and LG have collaborated to develop smart home accessories that support a "proximity control" feature. Users can activate the control interface by bringing their iPhone to within range of the compatible accessories, and the camera and doorbell can also display images directly.
iPhone or iPad that do not have the Lingdong Island function will display a 30-second notification. After the settings are completed, users can disable this function in the "Home" app. In the background, this accessory will write "apple-deviceid" into the "Matter" payload on its "NFC" tag, so that "iOS" can recognize it upon touch. It will also broadcast low-power Bluetooth advertisements for Apple proximity control.
The report claims that Apple introduced relevant code in the iOS 27 system. According to a blog post cited by IT, in the iOS 27.2 and Beta 3 updates, Apple has made a switch option available, which includes the following three options:
- Never: Disable proximity control.
- Request to initiate: Display dynamic island prompts or notifications, which include deep links to control cards.
- Automatic startup: Display the control card.
For further reading, the "Proximity Control" feature exposed this time is closely related to Apple's collaboration with LG's smart home accessories. According to Bloomberg, Apple has collaborated with LG to develop a series of smart home products, which include video doorbells, smart thermostats, door locks, indoor and outdoor cameras, and floodlight cameras. Some of these products are expected to support Matter and Thread protocols. These products will bear the LG brand, with LG responsible for manufacturing and after-sales service. Apple is mainly involved in the joint development to ensure that the products fit into its own ecosystem.
Apple has announced that it will hold an event themed around smart home technology on October 13, 2026, titled “Welcome Home.” It is expected that the event will see the launch of a new generation of Apple TV 4K devices, HomePod devices, mini devices, as well as a brand-new home hub device. According to leaks, this home hub will be equipped with a approximately 6-inch square touchscreen and will run on a new system with the internal code name “Charismatic,” which may be named “homeOS.” There is currently no official confirmation regarding whether LG accessories will also be unveiled at the event.
In addition to "proximity control," the iOS 27 code and the LG device firmware also feature a HomeKit exclusive "pair before powering on" function: when a user brings the iPhone close to devices such as door locks or thermostats, they can use the NFC to pre-write the pairing identity and Wi-Fi / Thread network credentials into the device's security components. Once the device is powered on, it automatically connects to the network, and then the home hub completes the Matter configuration. It is claimed that the NXP SE051H security component has been incorporated into the firmware of both door locks and thermostats, and the firmware replaces the Matter NFC mini-program with a HomeKit dedicated mini-program.
Regarding the Matter and NFC mentioned in the text: Matter is a smart home interoperability standard jointly promoted by multiple manufacturers. Traditional networking requires scanning a QR code or manually entering a pairing code, and then transmitting information to the smart home hub via low-power Bluetooth. Matter 1.4 added the capability to use NFC to initiate the networking process, but it still relied on Bluetooth; Matter 1.6, however, achieved the entire networking process solely through NFC, with target devices not even needing to be powered on. Necessary information could be saved in the NFC chip in advance and transmitted after the device was powered on. The NFC tag and Matter payload mentioned in the text fall within the scope of this mechanism.
Dynamic Island ( Dynamic Island ) is a screen interaction feature introduced by Apple starting from the iPhone 14 Pro series. Subsequent iPhone 15, 16, 17 series models, as well as the iPhone 18 series, are all equipped with this feature. Therefore, when referring to "models without Dynamic Island" in this text, it mainly refers to earlier models. These devices, along with the iPad, use a notification prompt that lasts for about 30 seconds in scenarios close to control operations.
