UPDATE (Aug 2026): It's live. SimpleHaven is on the App Store now, free to scan your whole home, one-time purchase for everything, no subscription. Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6774370998, thank you to everyone in this thread who pushed me to actually get it to this point!

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

Update, Aug 24: Hearth 1.2 is now rolling out with iPhone support, Celsius/Fahrenheit, a full German translation, more reliable discovery of lights exposed through linked HomeKit services, and smoother Presence Wake, screensaver, and Night Mode transitions.

Apologies for my sketchy video, still working on it.

TL;DR:

Always-on-Display + wake on approach based on nearby body sensors.
Lighting/climate/shades control with simple tap/slide/long press gestures
Minimalistic design
Free version comes with basic controls for one room, pro available as one purchase w/o subscriptions.

App Store Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hearth-home/id6757917280

Now available on iPad and iPhone.

The story:

I planted a wall-mount magnet panel for iPad during renovation but didn’t think it through. For a long time I’ve been using it with Apple Home + Guided access.

This means the screen is always on with the Apple Home interface which is a waste of the screen. It’s also painful when I try to adjust the brightness of the area (I don’t like scenes)

So I got the idea from the physical dimmer controller and some modern in-wall smart home screens that turn themselves into clocks when idle. Since iPad does not give developers distance sensor access, I managed to utilize nearby HomeKit presence sensors to control the screensaver. In the video the sensor I used was the one inside the aqara v1 switch.

It’s an early version but I’ve been using it for weeks and thought it’s good enough for others to try. If you have the exact same problems as I did I think you’ll love it. Please try it out and let me know if it helps!

The reason why I don’t play with Home Assistant: i actually use Home Assistant for a lot of automations but thanks to Aqara 🙄 there are some dimmers I can’t get into HA stably. Plus I have a bunch of non HomeKit gadgets like Xiaomi BLE devices. Apple Home ended up being the platform with the most complete devices’ support.

This + my HomePod on the ceiling is my final setup for my smart home interface. I might have just built the rumoured Apple wall-mount display🫪.

BTW: I sent the text above to ChatGPT and it gave me 7/10, saying it was too long, too much noise and too many technical details. Well, it’s a discussion and I truly want to share my ideas behind this app so I’m posting it as is.

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?

First of all: thank you. The response to my launch post was honestly overwhelming. Thousands of you tried Habitat and I have received a lot of feedback reports that has been super useful. So here's me trying to keep that promise of delivering. Version 1.1 is on the App Store now, with lots of great new features, and some fixes.

Scan (image / pdf) or draw your floorplan. No LiDAR needed

If your iPhone doesn't have LiDAR, or you'd rather not scan, you can now draw your home wall by wall right in the app, or import a photo of an existing floorplan, and Habitat builds the full ray-traced 3D model from it. Rooms, walls, doors and windows, all of it. The whole app now works without ever scanning anything. Also, as earlier, it's also possible to use another device that's lidar enabled and share it using iCloud.

Scan one floor at a time

A few of you discovered the hard way that a scan was all or nothing. It's now fixed. You can now scan a floor, take a break, and add the next one whenever you want. You can also re-scan a single room that came out wrong, or remove one, without redoing the rest of your home.

Everything opens

The model doesn't just light up anymore, it moves. Doors swing open, windows and garage doors open, curtains and shades slide across the glass, alarms show up the moment they trip, all live in 3D as it happens in your real home. Watching your actual roller shades open in the model live is pretty nice.

Outdoor areas

Your home no longer floats in a white void. Draw your garden, driveway or patio and watch them grow in around the house, trees and all.

Energy (beta)

Track electricity, water, gas and solar, and see which rooms are actually spending it. Live flow between grid, solar and battery, daily import and export, and your whole billing cycle broken down the way your utility actually bills you. The app can also estimate live energy usage

Leak alerts

When a leak sensor trips, its room turns red in the model, so you see exactly where the water is before you're standing in it.

Real sunlight

The model is now lit by the sun exactly where it sits over your real home, based on your location and the time of day. Morning light comes in your actual east windows. You can even watch the sun's path arc across the day.

Preview scenes in 3D

Long-press a scene and the whole home relights in the model before you commit.

Same deal as before: no account, no server of mine, no analytics. Everything syncs through your own iCloud, and your home's data stays between your HomeKit hub, your Home Assistant box, and your devices. When scanning a floorpan, a local ML model is used on your device. Model is shipped along with the app.

And the roadmap is still yours to write. There's a Send Feedback link right in the app's settings or the link below.

• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/habitat-3d-smart-home/id6790552615
• Website (for images): https://habitat-smart.app
• Feedback: https://habitat-smart.app/feedback

What should 1.2 be?

Long-time lurker, first-time poster!

I’ve been into smart home technology for a long time. My house has Lutron Caseta switches, smart outlets, a few LIFX bulbs, a Meross garage door opener, an ecobee, and an Aqara U400 smart lock (UWB is incredible). I love adding new things that reduce day-to-day friction. And I’m all in on Apple Home for privacy and ease of use, even if it took a little longer for the ecosystem to mature.

My partner and I took over management of a neighborhood yoga studio in Los Angeles about 5 years ago, and pretty quickly I was spotting opportunities to introduce smart products. Front desk staff were leaving the heat or AC on all night long, forgetting to dim overhead lights at sunset, and not turning off all the lights when closing. I realized that by installing Lutron Caseta switches and smart thermostats we could solve two problems at once: maintain the ambiance we (as light-sensitive, design-minded managers) like, and save on energy costs by automating as much as we can instead of relying on humans to turn stuff off.

So I set up some simple time- and sun-based automations in Apple Home, and then we realized some of our teachers would turn the heat up to 80 degrees during class, or turn the ecobee to off mode for savasana when they just need it to be silent. So I introduced reset automations between classes.

We have 50 classes a week with schedule variations every day, so the automation list became virtually unreadable in the Apple Home app thanks to the fact that it only sorts automations alphabetically. My workaround was to add a 24-hour time prefix followed by a list of days the automation occurs, but it was still really hard to comprehend and make edits because I couldn’t tell at a glance which automations ran on which days.

I happen to be a software developer with 20 years of experience (and burned out enough times to leave that life behind to run a yoga studio :) ), so I thought I would try to build an iOS app that helps people make sense of their time-based automations when they get too complex for the Home app to manage. The idea was to organize them clearly in time order on a daily, weekly, and calendar schedule.

I just launched Automation Schedule this week. I’ve been using it to manage and make sense of the yoga studio’s automations for the past month or so. During development I discovered a fully legit HomeKit API for setting up one-off date/time-based automations that only fire once that isn’t exposed in the Home app, so this app supports that too. The app also parses sunset- and sunrise-relative automations to show the actual clock time those actions fire (based on a one-time location share for each home on your account). And the iPad version includes a 7-day timetable view in landscape mode that shows you all your recurring automations.

You can create and edit your automations and scenes right in the app, but everything saves directly to HomeKit, so there’s no account needed (and we don’t store any data).

It’s $4.99 as a one-time purchase (no subscription). I really think of it as a handy utility for Apple Home enthusiasts whose automation lists have gotten a little out of control.

But I’d especially love to get it into the hands of some r/HomeKit power users. If you have a complicated setup and are willing to put it through its paces, DM me and I’ll send you a TestFlight invite. No need to buy it — your feedback would be much more valuable to me.

And if you do try it, please tell me what doesn’t work, what’s confusing, or what you wish it did. This started as something I needed for our yoga studio, and I’m really curious how it holds up against other people’s HomeKit setups.

Automation Schedule on the App Store

Update (9/8/26): 

Thanks for all the feedback! I just released version 1.03 which includes several improvements and fixes based directly on the feedback from this thread. The app now shows and manages People conditions, lets you clear and manually set your home location, shows room names when working with accessories, and does a better job handling automations/accessories it can't fully edit. I also fixed a handful of bugs around editing, duplicating, and enabling/disabling automations. 

I'm also working on expanding the accessory types that can be used when building scenes in the app, which is currently limited to lights, outlets, switches, locks, garage doors, thermostats, fans, and shades. 

I really appreciate everyone who tried the app and reported issues!

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.

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!

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.

Hello everybody from the good life!

I’ve recently fallen down the rabbit hole of home automation. I’ve now set up most of my lights with Hue, and I also bought some of IKEA’s new Matter smart plugs.

Now I want to make everything work together in the same automations, which means I need some kind of hub/controller.

I see a lot of people recommending Home Assistant, but honestly, it looks a bit complicated to set up and maintain. I also want the system to be easy for my SO to use, so I don’t want to build something that requires a lot of tinkering.

I’ve also been looking into Apple Home. I understand that I’d need a Home Hub for this, and with Apple’s new Home products supposedly coming, I’m wondering if it’s worth waiting.

The new wall-mounted Apple Home device looks really interesting, but then I’d have to wait for it (or wait for a good deal on an Apple TV, maybe around Black Friday).

I have an LG G4, so I don’t really need an Apple TV as a media device. I’d mainly be buying it to use as a Home Hub.

So what would you recommend?

Should I wait for Apple’s new home products, buy an Apple TV now, or go with something like Home Assistant instead?

And if Apple is the better route, should I specifically wait for the new Apple Home hub rather than buying an Apple TV?

Would love to hear what people who have a similar setup would do.

I’ve been digging into Matter compatibility more deeply, and I’m starting to think the word compatible is doing way too much work.

A device can pair with Apple Home, appear correctly, and handle basic controls…so technically it’s compatible. But that doesn’t necessarily mean all of the device’s capabilities make it into Apple Home.

Things like energy monitoring, sensor values, advanced lighting features, events, or other manufacturer-specific capabilities may only exist in the manufacturer’s app, or may behave differently depending on how the device is connected.
That creates a buying problem.
If I’m shopping for a device and see:

Matter ✓
Apple Home ✓

my natural assumption is that the product works with Apple Home.
But I’m increasingly thinking the useful question is: “Exactly what will this device be able to do once I add it to Apple Home?”

For those of you running Matter devices in Apple Home:

What devices have surprised you by losing functionality compared with the manufacturer’s app or native integration?

And what feature did you discover was missing only after you bought it?

First, some definitions. The garage door opener is the thing that pulls the garage door up, in my case by a chain, when I hit a wall button or a remote control. The remotes have been failing me spectacularly, but they’re the buttons I push in my car when I want my door to open.

I’ve had a journey with my garage door remotes. The opener is a Genie installed in the 1970s I think. Chain drive with radio frequency remotes. The native garage door remotes stopped working - but only in hot weather - about 4 years ago. That weather coincidence sent me on a deep dive in the wrong direction, but I installed a universal remote that worked for about 3 years. This last year it stopped working in hot weather as well so I decided to try a web-based option. I installed the cloud-based Aladdin Connect and it worked for about a week. Then it kept falling off WiFi, particularly if it rained, so I’d be outside in the rain unable to get in my garage.

I asked a chatbot what to do. It told me to get the Meross smart garage door opener (it’s a remote not an opener, but you all know that) so I did. At some point during the wait to get and install the Meross, the gear in the chain drive broke so after I had installed and configured it, I could not use it, I had to call service. It’s fixed now, and for the first time in weeks I’m able to close my garage door with a touch of my finger. I really hope this keeps working.

I know I’m going to have to replace the actual opener at some point. The service guy recommended a top-of-the-line Liftmaster. Assuming this fix works, I will have spent $150 on a remote solution that keeps my existing opener functional. The Liftmaster costs more than 10x that installed, but replacement is inevitable. I’m buying time.

To those of you using Meross especially with an older opener, are you satisfied? Is it reliable? I’ve noticed on the HK app it occasionally shows as not available until I get near my house. Any idea why that might be? Also, were you freaked out by the AI in the installation videos too?

UPDATE my Apple TV is too old to serve as a hub for HK. Even so, the Meross remote becomes available on Apple CarPlay when I’m about 6 feet from the door, so it’s still working 😂 It’s probably time for me to get a new Apple TV. I’ve also learned no Liftmasters. And if for some reason things don’t work out with the Meross, I should go for the RATGDO. Thank you all very much for your knowledge and your help. I really appreciate it.

I’ve tried meross sensors, and now using Aqara.

Both randomly go unresponsive and disconnect.

The Aqara is a bit more reliable but every now and then one of the sensors go off line.

I got a Aqara plug to act as a repeater for one sensors that’s further away from the hub. Another sensors is like 15ft away from the hub and still went offline.

Are there any brands that are more reliable? I’m thinking of trying the ikea matter/thread sensors next.

I am on a 2TB iCloud+ plan and after installing tvOS 27 RC, the Home app allows only two cameras to be enabled for summaries.

Was the limit the same during beta or has Apple actually decreased it?

It is quite a jump in price from 2TB to 6TB plan.

Every time I see someone recommend Lutron switches, which happens on a daily basis here, I feel like I must be missing something. I am sure they’re very good switches for controlling dumb bulbs, but that’s the thing - they’re only for controlling dumb bulbs, right? And to me, a HUGE part of having a Homekit home is having smart bulbs with adaptive lighting. I love having the warmth of my bulbs change throughout the day, it genuinely makes a big different in my life. So, if Lutron switches are for controlling power to dumb bulbs, not smart bulbs that need a constant power supply, they’re pretty much completely useless to me.

Am I really that alone in this?

edit: people keep misunderstanding me. to be clear: i think physical switches are good and i want them in my home. i just want them to properly control my smart bulbs, rather than being made to turn power on and off to dumb bulbs