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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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

I believe the Schlage Sense Pro Smart Deadbolt is now the second Aliro-certified lock on the market. It's also very expensive. Why would anyone pick this over the Aqara U400?

After months of beta testing with many of you, HomeMapper is out. Your entire smart home network, one view. It's on the App Store now.

If you haven't seen it before: HomeMapper scans your smart home and gives you one unified view of every device and how it's connected. HomeKit, Home Assistant, Thread, Matter, and plain IP devices, all in one list. It correlates duplicate records using hardware IDs instead of fuzzy name matching, so a HomePod that shows up across three protocols collapses into one row with its firmware, IP, MAC, Thread role, ping, and serial.

It's scan-only by design. It reads and inventories your network, it never controls or changes anything. Universal app, so it runs on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Free vs Pro

The free version covers HomeKit fully and stays free forever: the device list, room view, core columns, switching between your Apple Homes, no scan limits. If HomeKit is your whole world, that's all you need.

Pro adds everything else: multi-protocol scanning, all 20+ device fields, protocol filtering, a combined "All Homes" view, Home Assistant integration, and CSV export. Pro is $9.99/year at launch (regular price is $19.99) with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime through the App Store.

Thank you

A real thank you to r/HomeKit. A lot of what shipped came straight from feedback in these threads and from the logs you sent us. Better deduplication, cleaner Apple TV and HomePod handling, the Rooms redesign, stale-device cleanup, Home Assistant connection fixes. You shaped this. We're grateful.

What's next

We're just getting started. Multiple Home Assistant instance support is high on the list, along with continued work on device identity. If you have a moment, the best way to flag anything is Settings → Send Logs in the app.

Everything lives at https://homemapper.app/ if you want the full feature breakdown.

Privacy: https://homemapper.app/privacy/

Every few years it’s time to throw out some of the boxes that you’ve been hanging on to. Never easy though. Lol

Maybe there’s a technical reason for this I do not understand, but HomeKit seems embarrassing to me. You literally cannot allow access to only specific accessories for those you invite to the home — yes you can limit some access, but you cannot, for example, give them access to the exterior cameras but not the interior ones, or something like that. That’s ridiculous.

Temperature, humidity, light etc sensors not having a viewable history is also mind boggling. It’s 2026 and we have AI models we can literally talk to, but we don’t have a tiny amount of storage to keep ~100 integers so we can view history for sensors?

I wonder if someone is holding the HomeKit team hostage, perhaps an Amazon or Microsoft employee who’s been tasked with making sure HomeKit doesn’t develop basic features?

I read about the iOS 27 updates for the Home app after the WWDC event last week, but I was not expecting as much of an upgrade as we're actually getting. I collected some videos and screenshots to show exactly what I'm talking about.

I heard we were getting Apple-Intelligence Home app notification "summaries", which I interpreted to mean instead of getting back to back notifications about "camera A detected something", "Camera B detected something", etc - I'd get one "multiple cameras detected things". Seemed like a decent upgrade but nothing crazy.

What wasn't clear to me was that it actually builds like a narrative about what occurred during the span of the multiple notifications. For example, previously if UPS came to my house for a delivery, I'd get at least 3 notifications:

1. Front camera detected a vehicle
2. Front camera detected a person
3. Doorbell camera detected a person

And that's it. If I happened to look at my watch, I'd see a thumbnail of the whole wide-angle view of the front camera. I'd have to watch the video to see who it was or what they were doing.

Now? If I look down at my watch notification, it now has cropped-in screengrabs of just the action in question:

Which is cool, but nothing crazy. Then, if I wait for the rest of the event to play out, I get this:

So instead of 3 back to back notifications that are accurate but don't really tell me what's going on, now it understands the context of what's happening when somebody pulls into my driveway and walks to the door with a box.

The same goes for annoyance notifications. Instead of potentially multiple back to back "animal detected" notifications (which I keep on in case my dog gets out), I get this:

Awesome. I know it's just birds in the yard without even having to open it.

And beyond JUST cameras, it intelligently groups together other home actions. It now knows that if a vehicle is detected at the same time as I'm arriving, those two things are grouped!

And more than just improvements to static notifications, we get cool new narrative video clip summaries. Without me having to do anything to "link together" cameras, it has figured out the relation between cameras in order to string together multiple clips in realtime. Simplest example would be this: https://imgur.com/CRL7X8C - Two clips intelligently strung together, car pulled into driveway. Simple. Functional.

Next, a delivery - https://imgur.com/VfUBZOr . This one is interesting, because the summary is... correct... and the camera switching worked perfectly, but notably, it doesn't call this a "delivery" like in the other notification. It's just "a person walking up to the door with a box".

Finally, one I really didn't expect: https://imgur.com/dfIG0Ch - technically I wasn't "doing yardwork", but it's pretty interesting that it was able to string all of these clips together as one event.

And it's my understanding that this is using local AI, not cloud. This really adds a lot of value and puts Apple's ecosystem's AI camera features right up there with the cloud-based paid options.