Why is Follow the Sun only available on the Mac?

Third Party HomeKit apps have to operate within certain operating restrictions - most of these limitations are designed to protect the battery life of the devices, and the privacy of the users, but it does limit their usefulness.

Mac Apps have more freedom than iOS, and have different ways to work within these limitations. Follow the Sun has the ability to control your devices, even when you’re not directly using the app - it accomplishes this by adjusting certain energy settings, keeping it ‘awake’ as long as it’s running, even if another user is logged in to the Mac.

Activity Monitor says Follow the Sun is preventing sleep? Why?

Follow the Sun for HomeKit can control your HomeKit devices, even if you’re not directly using the app - this is accomplished by adjusting energy settings for the app, keeping it ‘awake’ as long as it’s running. A trade off for this ability, however, is that it needs to prevent your Mac from sleeping.

This will have an impact on the energy usage of your Mac, and is an unfortunate, but necessary trade off. For these reasons, it is recommended that Follow the Sun be used on a Mac that remains plugged in and on all the time — it will work on a laptop, but if you put your laptop into Hibernation mode by closing the lid, Follow the Sun will hibernate as well.

I have a few lights that keep turning themselves on - what gives!?

When a device is off, Follow the Sun will still issue brightness changes to it - most lights will either ignore these, or will accept them, so the light is at the right brightness the next time it’s turned on. Some manufacturers, however, interpret this as a request to power on the device - these include (but are probably not limited to) Leviton dimmers, and the Nanoleaf Essentials line.

These are great devices (I have several!), and Follow the Sun is still able to work with them - you’ll just need to enable the ‘Do not transition with power off’ setting, which can be found on the light itself.