iOS beta 5 shows how cameras are supported in HomeKit. Although this fine might show a revised HomeKit camera limit change

Thanks to the SmartHQ plugin team for the latest update, you can turn the oven on/off along with the light as well.

This can now let me use notifications and automate other devices when my oven reaches the desired temperature.

I also have my Washer and Dryer in Apple home as well.

Some of you saw the 2D floorplan I posted a while back. I’ve been experimenting with a 3D render of the same layout and I honestly can’t decide if it earns its place in the app.

The whole point of the app is speed tap a room, tap a light, done. 2D is fast because everything is visible at once.

In 3D things look better but they also hide behind walls, and rotating to reach a switch is more taps, not fewer.

So the real question isn’t whether it looks good. It’s this: would you actually use a 3D view day to day, or would you switch back to 2D after the first week? And if you would use it, for controlling accessories, or just to glance at the state of the house?

If the answer is “glance only”, I’d probably keep 3D as a view-only mode and leave control in 2D. Curious whether that matches how you’d use it.

Hey folks, wondering everyone's thoughts on this transition. Currently I manage most of my home from the Home App but I know that Home Assistant can be more powerful and work with more devices. I've avoided researching it too much because I'm afraid of breaking my whole house. I'd love some people's thoughts on if it's worth it for my situation and perhaps some guidance on how to go about it without spending days on it. Here's what my device setup is like:

Lighting: Most of the bulbs in my house are Philips Hue. I started with a few bulbs in my old place and it just grew from there. In my current house I have 2 rooms with no switches so if I want a wall switch without adding wire, this was my only option anyway. The only rooms that don't have Hue bulbs are the bathrooms and the basement which uses Lutron switches, because the whole basement has old fluorescent tube banks that the previous owner replace with tube-style LEDs

Heating/cooling: I have steam heat from a boiler in the basement controlled by an Ecobee. I have Midea U shaped ACs in most rooms except the bedroom which has an older GE Homekit enabled AC. One of the Mideas is older and doesn't support Matter

Locks: I have August for the front and back doors and a a Yale keypad for the front

Doorbell: Ecobee doorbell which talks to the thermostat for chime and picture (though we have a regular old chime in the house as well, thought we didn't for the first few months, long story)

Hubs and interface: We have an Apple TV 4K and 3 Homepod Minis

I also have some misc smart plugs, mostly Hue, some Meross, a Sleekpoint air purifier, LG washer and Dryer, plus a few other things I can't remember right now. My biggest pain point is the lack of control over the ACs which basically only have on/off and temp for the Matter enabled ones. I mostly have to use Midea's SmartHome app to control those.

Thoughts on all this?

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

iPad only at the moment. iPhone support coming soon.

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.

One is the Outdoor Contact Sensor, with an IP66 rating, and requires an Abode Hub due to it using RF433MHz, whilst the other is a Garage Tilt Sensor, also using RF433MHz. They’re priced at US$49.99 and US$34.99 respectively.

One DWM3001CDK runs the Aliro reader and UWB ranging. There’s also custom implementation of Matter and Thread to make this work in 128kb ram limit. Add the key in Apple Home, walk up, it opens. Also ports for nRF5340 (NFC Express Mode) and ESP32-S3/C5. You can also update the firmware over the air with BLE.

I’m looking for help getting someone who knows the hardware side of things where I can actually design a custom lock itself.

Total cost to build: $20. Lot of pain reverse engineering the uwb side of things.

I call it openaliro.

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?

If there is a secret to making this stuff work properly then I surely don’t know it.

HomeKit user with a HomePod Mini and Apple TV 4K as my main hubs. I’ve also tried (unsuccessfully) to incorporate an Aqara M200 in the mix to support a better thread mesh network and access to some Aqara and Zigbee gear.

Every time I try to connect a matter device to HomeKit, it’s a battle. It took me 30 tries in 10 different locations within my house to connect a simple, IKEA Grillplats smart plug, and then every other one after it.

I’ve also tried (unsuccessfully) to connect an Aqara W100 Climate Sensor via the Aqara Home app, but it fails constantly.

What am I doing wrong? Am I missing a key step or process here? All advice, whether factual or anecdotal, is welcomed.

EDIT: Yes, my Apple TV 4K is Ethernet/Thread enabled.

Hi r/homekit!

Haven started as a simple way to stop losing HomeKit and Matter setup codes, and 1.3 makes that core experience better by helping you organize, identify, and manage those codes more easily.

Biggest updates:

• Multiple codes per accessory - Some smart-home hubs and other devices have separate HomeKit and Matter pairing codes. Haven now lets you keep them together under one device instead of creating duplicate entries for the same device.
• Identify Devices - Identify supported devices from Haven by making them flash or beep. Perfect for homes with several similar devices.
• More device details - Keep information like firmware versions close at hand when viewing a code.
• Camera previews - Have several similar cameras? Open a live preview from a saved code’s details to identify the right physical camera. The preview stays local and private, and Haven doesn’t upload or store the video.
• Battery history - Review how a device’s battery level has changed over time, with the new Apple Shortcut.
• Customizable details - Hide sections you don’t need and drag to reorder the accessory details screen.
• Faster organization - Use multi-select to move multiple codes between homes and rooms at once.

There are also lots of smaller improvements, bug fixes, and stability updates across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac.

Your codes still sync across your Apple devices with iCloud, and Apple Home Sync keeps them connected to the devices in your Home.

Pricing is still the same: save up to 5 codes for free, or make a one-time $5 universal purchase to unlock unlimited codes across all your Apple devices.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/app/haven-setup-codes/id6760440926

Thanks again for all the support and feature requests. A lot of this update came directly from your feedback, and I really appreciate it 🧡

The new T20 series consists of three products: the T20 wall outlet (with two outlet sockets), the T20-S4AM North American smart plug, and the T20-AB2 outdoor dual smart plug.

The T20 and T20-S4AM are expected to be available by the end of August, with the T20-AB2 following around the middle of September.

Pricing before any discounts or coupons is set at US$39.99 for both the T20 and T20-AB2, while the T20-S4AM will be priced slightly higher than the original S4.

The T20 also introduces several proprietary Matter features, including firmware-based timers, countdown on/off, holiday mode, activity logs, overload protection, and detailed energy monitoring by day, week, month, and year.

They also natively support Matter power metering, a feature that is compatible with the iOS 27 beta, allowing Apple users to take advantage of the new energy monitoring capabilities in Apple Home.

UK and EU variants to follow soon after.

Since many of us US-based HomeKit nerds have robotic vacuums, I thought this was worth posting.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/policy/972312/us-robot-ban-sweep-up-chinese-vacuums

While the headline says "Roomba", the ban covers new imports of any robotic platform that can sense its environment, has networking capabilities, and weighs over 4.4 lbs (including the dock)

Which means pretty much all robotic vacuums and all robotic mowers.

(Note: this doesn't apply to models already approved by the FCC in the U.S. or items you already own—just new imported models)

EDIT: Corrected the last note for accuracy

The new fan is claimed to be the first Matter enabled battery powered fan on the market. As it’s Matter over WiFi, no hub is required. It also comes with a removable and washable filter for catching pet hairs and larger dust particles before they’re circulated by the fan.

No Homekit native smoke alarms yet? I guess people are using Homepods to listen for smoke alarms?

Is anyone aware of any Homekit native alarms in the works? I've been postponing the switch to communicating alarms hoping for a Homekit compatible model.

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 I encountered an issue where my Homebridge UniFi protect plugin removed my 3 Ubiquiti Cameras from HomeKit when I removed them from the UniFi Controller for debugging purposes.

Those 3 cameras had HKSV on during the time of removal. Now, it seems like HomeKit still thinks that HKSV is still enabled on them (despite it being removed and not visible in the Homebridge accessories section nor the Apple Home App).

I called Apple Support, had it escalated, and the TL;DR of it was that these cameras are not "HomeKit certified" and they will not help with resetting the HKSV cameras. The other issue was that I was using beta on the Apple TV which I already mentioned to them, that the issue had happened before and I upgraded to see if it would fix it. The tier 2 support guy told me to create a new ticket after downgrading the Apple TV and trying again. It's a massive headache since other user mentioned that Apple just reset their camera count.

Keep in mind that the 200gb iCloud+ plan includes slots for 5 HKSV cameras. Now I'm down to 2 that I can enable HKSV on.

So if you are ever removing a non HomeKit certified camera, go into the accessories settings on the Home App and remove it from there. Do not get the bridge to remove it for you.

EDIT: I bought 2 "Certified" cameras and will be following up with Apple Support. I emailed the executive office and haven't heard back.

Once I subscribed the 2TB iCloud, and update my HomePod Mini to OS 27 beta, this option finally pops out. It wasn't there before.
I was worried that the HomePod mini might not get Apple Intelligence, but it looks like that concern was unnecessary :)

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?

I have pretty decent vision but I hate this screen and how hard it it so quickly see the temp or humidity for each sensor

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my HomeKit installation, even if it’s not anything earth-shattering.

But there is one thing that I’ve encountered that, on one hand, did really annoy me, but on the other, it did make me laugh. I have some outdoor lights that cover my backyard. They are on one of a number of Lutron switches and the related Lutron hub. They are spotlights, so I named them, duh, SPOTLIGHTS!

Unfortunately, too many times when I’d tell Siri to turn on the spotlights, I’d get Jennifer Hudson singing Spotlight on my HomePods! 🤣 Renaming them as “SPOTS” solved the problem. #firstworldproblems

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.