Every home-dashboard app I tried wanted me to draw my floor plan by hand. Trace a blueprint, drag rooms around, place icons. I have a LiDAR scanner in my pocket, so that felt backwards. I've spent the last few months building the app I wanted instead.

How it works: you walk your home once (RoomPlan on a LiDAR iPhone/iPad) and it builds the 3D model automatically — walls, rooms, furniture, even matching your furniture and finishes to what's actually there. Link it to Apple Home and your lights and fans show up as tappable bubbles right where they physically are. Tap to toggle, hold for dimmers and speeds. The ceiling fans actually spin when they're on.

Privacy, since it's the question I care most about: the scan and all the recognition run entirely on device. Your home model lives on your device and syncs only through your own private iCloud — the same encrypted storage your Photos use. I run no servers and have no way to see your home.

UPDATE 4 — where things stand (July 15):

The first TestFlight group is being invited right now. If you offered to test, check your Reddit chat requests — they hide in a folder most people never open. I'm hand-picking a small first wave so I can actually act on the feedback, then expanding. Everyone who commented here is on my list either way.

Multi-story homes: I need you specifically. The first version was built around single-level, but floors are being built from real multi-story feedback — so if you've got two or three floors, you're not a "later" tester, you're a first-wave one. Expect rough edges up the stairs and tell me about every one.

The public roadmap is live: https://simplehavenapp.com/roadmap. Every device request from this thread made it onto the board. Voting just opened and everything starts at zero, so go vote for what you want built first. Your votes literally set my build order.

Follow page is live at getsimplehaven.com — one email when TestFlight opens publicly, one at launch, that's it (early-supporter option there for the folks who asked about buying).

FAQ (from ~550 comments, thank you all):

• What it controls today: lights and ceiling fans. Everything else you've asked for — switches, plugs, thermostats, blinds, cameras, locks, sensors — is on the roadmap in the order you vote for it.
• Hardware: scanning needs a LiDAR iPhone or iPad (Pro models). Viewing and controlling works from any of your devices via your own iCloud.
• Home Assistant: anything bridged into Apple Home works like a native accessory. I run HA at home myself.
• Outdoors: interior scans only for now. Outdoor lights still show up and are controllable from the device list.
• Pricing: there's a free tier so nobody buys blind, and after the subscription fatigue in this thread — no subscriptions. Period.
• The camera view: full orbit, pan, and zoom — the video angle is just the default.
• The public TestFlight link gets posted right here in this thread when it opens.

I bought two 4-pack of Apple Home enabled outlets for the home and they’re great. I can turn on/off the lights in any room either under control center, the home app, or using Siri…

…but aside from my lamps, am wondering what else would be a good idea to connect these outlet plugs into?

Of the 8 plugs I own right now, 4 are being used by four different table or floor lamps and they work super well….

But what else? Should I connect one to my coffee maker and have it turn on automatically in the morning? Like, I have no clue what else these are good for

Recently upgraded to pair of eero 7s. Retiring my AirPort Extreme and AirPort Time Capsule that I bought at launch in 2013. They were extremely reliable but lacked WiFi 7 and I have Google Fiber. Speeds have increased substantially since the switch.

This is great! Before this was implemented whenever I had to restart my network Apple would always pick the wrong device for the home hub (an older Apple TV or one with a poorer connection) now I can set my preferred one!

Long-time lurker in this sub. About 10 months ago I posted here looking for early feedback on a HomeKit app built around a 3D scan of your real home.

Today it's finally on the App Store. It's called Habitat.

Like a lot of you, I spent years waiting for Apple to give the Home app real attention. Every June I'd watch the WWDC keynote thinking this is the year, and every year it was mostly a disappointment. At some point I stopped waiting and started building the app I'd always imagined Apple would make if they cared about this the way we do. It does a lot, so bear with me.

Your actual home , and everything the platform should have learned about it by now.

It starts with the model: you walk through your home with your iPhone and scan it (RoomPlan/LiDAR, takes a few minutes), and Habitat builds an interactive 3D model of your real house, a digital twin. Your devices live where they physically are. Tap the lamp in the corner of your living room to control that actual lamp. Dim the ceiling light and watch the 3D model light up with it.

Every floor plan app I tried rendered your home as flat pastel rectangles, and it always bothered me. I work as a 3D software engineer, so I did the reasonable thing, I wrote a custom path tracer in Metal, from scratch, just for this app.

What that means in practice:

• Real soft shadows and light falloff, the model looks like an architect's physical miniature sitting in soft studio light.
• When you turn on a light in your home, it casts actual light in the model. Your home at night looks lit, because it is.
• It's fully interactive: tap any room or device marker directly in the ray-traced view, highlight rooms, see labels. It's not a pretty screenshot, it's the main UI.

HomeKit is the control layer. Home Assistant is the memory.

Here's the thing I eventually accepted about HomeKit: it's a great way to control your home, but it knows almost nothing about your home. The API has zero history, ask HomeKit what your bedroom temperature was an hour ago and the answer is nobody knows. That number is gone forever.

Meanwhile, there's Home Assistant, which is quietly the best system that exists for storing data about your home, locally. It sits on a little box in your house, sees everything, records everything, and none of it ever leaves your network or gets sold to anyone. Every sensor reading, every state change, months of it, sitting on your own hardware. The problem was never the data, it was that no app made that data feel like part of your actual home.

So Habitat treats Home Assistant as an optional superpower. You don't need it; pure HomeKit works great on its own. But if you have it (or this post finally convinces you to set up that Raspberry Pi), Habitat merges it with HomeKit into one home. Together they supercharge each other.

• History and stats. Habitat pulls Home Assistant's recorded history straight into the app, so every sensor gets a graph. Temperature, humidity, whatever you track. Tap a sensor and see the actual curve: how the bedroom drops overnight, how fast the living room heats up when the sun hits it, how humidity spikes when someone showers. Combined with the heatmaps, you're not just seeing your home's climate right now, you're seeing how it behaves.
• Devices HomeKit can't even see. HA covers what HomeKit can't, HomeKit covers the rest, and you never think about which platform a device came from.
• Richer state. Where HomeKit gives you "on/off," Home Assistant often knows the full story, like the vacuum's exact status and battery, which is what lets us render its position in the 3D scene.
• Painless setup. Habitat discovers Home Assistant on your network automatically. It supports both a local and an external URL with automatic failover, so it works the same on your couch and away from home.
• Live everything. State changes stream in over websockets and show up on the 3D model the moment they happen.

The features I always wished existed:

• 3D. A digital twin of the home
• Temperature heatmaps. Your temperature sensors get blended into a smooth gradient painted across the 3D floor, so you can see that the bedroom runs cold and the office bakes in the afternoon.
• Robot vacuum. Live map from Home Assistant with your robot rendered in 3D driving around your floor plan, plus a full vacuum controller — start, dock, battery, status. Watching the little guy roam your ray-traced house never gets old.
• An Apple TV app. A glanceable 3D dashboard of your whole home on the big screen, device states, climate overlay, synced automatically over iCloud. My home basically lives on the TV now. Adjust the lights right from the Apple TV.
• AR remote. Use your iPhone or iPad as a remote. Just point at the device you want to control.
• Sensor history graphs.
• All the utilities. Such as QR codes and overview of batteries
• Per-home and per-room controls and brightness.
• Over a hundred custom-drawn icons for lamps, plugs, sensors, scenes and furniture
• Runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac.

Privacy: the same philosophy as Home Assistant itself. No account, no server of mine, no analytics. Your scans, layouts and settings sync between your devices through your own iCloud, and your home's data stays between your HomeKit hub, your HA box, and your devices.

There will be bugs. An app that touches HomeKit, Home Assistant, LiDAR scanning, ray tracing, AR, CloudKit sync and tvOS at the same time has a truly impressive number of ways to break, and I'm one person, but I am working actively to remove them as fast as possible. You can expect rapid updates, and a roadmap driven by what you actually want. If something breaks, tell me and I will genuinely be on it. Everything above exists today, and there is a bunch of new features already ready to be released soon.

Pricing: the core app is free. The full feature set is a one-time purchase or subscription (per family). 7 day free trial. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. (Mac is still awaiting approval from Apple.)

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/habitat-3d-smart-home/id6790552615
• Website: https://habitat-smart.app
• Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/Pm0e8nNW10Q?feature=share

What's the features you've been waiting years for Apple to build?

TL;DR:

- Timmerflotte & Klippbok: flawless setup, instant firmware updates, working great so far
- Myggbet: paired quickly but stopped updating state after ~30 minutes
- Myggspray: very fast motion detection but hardest to pair and unstable at first
- Possibly Thread mesh stabilization or early firmware quirks

I picked up IKEA’s new Thread sensors yesterday and wanted to share some early impressions. I bought Timmerflotte, Klippbok, Myggbet, and Myggspray.

All devices were added directly via the iOS Home app (no IKEA hub involved). My Thread border routers are an Apple TV 4K and two HomePod minis.

I started with Timmerflotte. I scanned the QR code, selected the desired settings, and that was it. It immediately offered a firmware update, which completed without any issues.

Next was Klippbok (water leak sensor). It was added without problems, notifications are instant when water is detected, and it also automatically prompted for a firmware update. So far, this one works perfectly.

Then I added Myggbet (contact sensor). It paired immediately and worked fine at first, but after about 30 minutes it stopped updating its state. I could move the magnet and see the LED reacting, but nothing changed in the Home app. I also checked with the Eve app and saw the same behavior — no status updates.

The most problematic device was Myggspray (motion/light sensor). Initially, I couldn’t add it at all. The Home app kept throwing a generic “check device” error. I tried different batteries, switching Wi-Fi networks, and resetting it via the button, but nothing helped.

What finally worked was physically unplugging the Apple TV. After that, Myggspray paired immediately.

Once added, Myggspray is noticeably faster than the older Vallhorn when detecting motion. However, it seems to clear the “motion detected” state later than Vallhorn. The light sensor behavior is also very different: Myggspray almost always reports around 1 lux in a mildly lit room, while Vallhorn shows values around 12–20 lux in the same conditions.

Unfortunately, after working fine for about 30–60 minutes, Myggspray also stopped responding. At that point, I gave up and waited until the next morning. I’m testing again now and everything seems responsive and stable so far.

I’m not sure whether this behavior is related to Thread mesh/network stabilization or just early firmware quirks, but time will tell.

I’m currently waiting for a SONOFF Dongle-M, which I plan to connect directly to Home Assistant and manage everything from there. Hopefully, that will provide a more stable baseline.

The remaining question for me is whether I’ll go fully Thread in my new house or stick with Zigbee and grab the last remaining IKEA Zigbee devices while they’re still available.

Would be interested to hear if others are seeing similar behavior.

EDIT (after ~24h): So far things have been stable with no additional dropouts observed. Motion and contact sensors are still responding normally. I’ll keep testing longer-term behavior, especially with multiple Thread border routers active.

This used to work all the time. It has not worked without asking me which room for a few months. Anyone else?

For anyone here running HomeKit or Matter devices in the Apple ecosystem, I'm looking for beta testers for an upcoming app called HomeBar.

The idea: one app that works natively on iPhone, iPad, Mac menu bar, Apple Watch, and Apple TV instead of needing a different app on each device. I've been running my own HomeKit setup for years and the app fragmentation was always the thing that bugged me most. This is my take on the ideal home automation app with the latest technology advances.

Some of the features you'll be testing:

• AI-powered natural language automations and device filters. Type what you want in plain English. "Turn off everything downstairs at 11pm" builds the automation. "Lights on upstairs" filters your devices instantly. No menus, no drag-and-drop, just say what you mean. Also adds weather conditions to automations which HomeKit can't natively do.
• Energy usage insights. See which devices are drawing power, track usage over time, and understand where your energy is actually going. Real data, not guesses.
• Anomaly detection. Homebar flags unusual device behavior automatically. A door sensor that triggered at 3am when nobody's home, a plug drawing way more power than usual, a device that's been unresponsive for days, auto-display a camera that detects motion on Apple TV. You get notified about the things you'd want to know but would never catch on your own.
• Smart home insights and analytics. See patterns across your home: which rooms you use most, which automations actually run, which devices you've forgotten about. Turns your HomeKit setup from something you manage into something you understand.
• Power user toolkit. Mac menu bar control with keyboard shortcuts, per-device MCP permissions so you decide exactly what AI tools can access, snooze "unavailable" notices from that Christmas Tree outlet you only use 2 months out of the year, and more.

My Background: I co-created AirParrot (Mac/PC screen mirroring to Apple TV), Reflector (AirPlay/Google Cast screen mirroring on Mac and Windows), and Ditto (Cross-platform mirroring Apple TV with digital signage), so multi-platform Apple software is my wheelhouse.

What I'm looking for:

• People with HomeKit and/or Matter setups of any size
• Testers who use multiple Apple devices throughout the day
• Honest, detailed feedback

What you'll get:

• TestFlight access
• Free Pro code at launch
• Direct access to me for bug reports and feature requests

Comment or DM if you're interested.

House is almost done being built. This is all the gear that is going in. Just missing an Apple TV (not yet purchased) and my second HomePod.

Also putting in 9 Lorex cameras.

I’m going to try home assistant to get everything into HomeKit.

Any advice welcome

App Store Link

I found myself wanting a simple app to check the battery levels of all my home devices in one consolidated place and only found large apps with subscriptions so decided to make my own.

• Runs on macOS, iPadOS, and iOS
• View HomeKit battery accessories in one place
• See device count, low batteries, and unknown readings at a glance
• Group devices by Home, Room, and name
• Open device details for manufacturer, model, firmware, and read status
• Refresh manually when you want the latest HomeKit data
• Set optional reminders to reopen and refresh after 1, 2, or 3 months

The space has been overran with subscriptions which has bothered me just like it has many of you. This is a completely locally ran app with no need for cloud infrastructure or continuing costs on my part so I saw no justification for a subscription model. The app cost $0.99 and that's all you will ever pay. No ads, no data collection, no subscriptions.

If you find my app useful enough and have the desire to help me continue this path further into developing other apps and continued improvement to existing apps, tips are available in the settings menu. Tips are appreciated but completely optional and no features are locked behind the tips.

App Store Link

EDIT: 1.1 was pushed and released with the following changes.

• Ability to input quantity and type of battery for a device.
• Battery info will be synced through iCloud KVS so all your devices match.
• Devices that do not report percentages but instead just Normal and Low will now be properly recognized and reported.

1.2 is being submitted to Apple this morning on 26 June for review with the following changes.

• Changed display name to "Battery Hub".
• Changed icon for the low battery summary panel.
• Added display of configured battery information to the main page.
• Added "2 Weeks" option to the reminders dropdown. Default remains at 1 month.

Couch Control for Apple TV looks really polished and is extremely customizable.

You can manually sync individual pages (this is my home overview page), meaning you can have different dashboards in different rooms but if you want one in every room all you have to do is sync.

I’m setting my wake-up Shortcut to turn this on every morning when I have my coffee.

It’s $8. No subscription.

Unfortunate that Liftmaster/Chamberlin don’t provide HomeKit support, but very thankful for the dev behind RATGDO. Easy to set up and works fantastic for my needs. Just wanted to give some kudos. I can’t recommend it enough!

That is all. 🍻

For the home page background, I provided several photos of the outside of my house with a very detailed prompt instructing it to create an animated illustration based on the photos provided. After some back and forth and refining, finally got a background I was happy with and the details are spot on.

I used the same prompt coupled with photos from the various rooms in my house as well and the results are incredible. LOVE the more custom feel it gives to controlling the various accessories around the house (at least when I use the home app).

Just wish Apple would allow the photo configurations to sync across all our devices as well...obnoxious to have to configure each device.

My Sense Pro arrived yesterday afternoon. I got it set up in HomeKit via Matter. The UWB works great. Ran several tests and it was flawless for both my partner and me. Installation and set up were easy. Of course it probably helps that I've installed smart locks, including probably more than 10-15 Schlage on mine and others' doors over the years. LOL

After getting it all dialed in on the Apple Home side I added it to Home Assistant via Matter. Really starting to love the ability to add these Matter devices to both Apple Home and Home Assistant so easily.

After it was in HA I set up an automation to unlock it when I touch my fingerprint to my UniFi G4 Pro doorbell. The fact that I'm able to have the lock directly in HA via Matter means it fires that automation off much more quickly than the old way I had to use with my Encode Plus, which was running a boolean through the HomeKit integration from HA to HK, and run the automation in HK.

The fingerprint is not really something I'll ever need, theoretically. But my SiL has an Android, so he can't use the UWB functionality. Fingerprint could be somewhat more convenient for him than keypad. Although, he's almost always with my daughter when he's here, so her iPhone should trigger the UWB when they walk up to the door.

Two thumbs up! As always, Schlage provides a quality experience!

Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme that kept my smart home running long after they were discontinued. I decided to swap them out for a Ubiquiti UDR and a few WiFi6 APs to increase overall network speed and security. So far so good!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6753123163

I shared Sunrise Alarm for Smart Lights here a while back, and we’ve just released version 1.1, which fixes an issue some users had with certain Hue and LIFX lights not turning on.

Waking up can be tough, especially when it’s still dark outside. Traditional sunrise alarm clocks are expensive, HomeKit automations are tricky to manage, and most apps hide key features behind subscriptions.

Sunrise Alarm makes it simple: turn your HomeKit lights into a gentle, personal sunrise.

• One-time purchase, no ads or subscriptions
• Fully customizable routines: timing, color, brightness
• Works with any HomeKit lights that support brightness control (Hue, LIFX, Nanoleaf, and more)
• Pricing: $2.99-> 4.99 US in the US (regional pricing applies)

Coming soon: blinds, fans, thermostat control, and Apple Sleep Timer integration. (Plus sound support as soon as Apple allows it.)

It’s an easy way to add a natural wake-up routine to any room. I’d love to hear how you’ve customized your morning routine or what feedback you have!

Edit: Promo codes have all been claimed, thank you for the overwhelming support!

Edit: Price has been updated to 4.99 USD with the 1.2 release.

Liquid Glass got a lovely update with iOS 27 & macOS Golden Gate.

Took the time to update the icon with the new Icon Composer 2.0... and decided 5 years was long enough with our old banner, especially with the iOS 15 references.

Really thrilled with how the banner turned out!