Home+ 6 4+

A fantastic app that has been improved with 5.0 and iOS 14 support. It’s almost perfect, but widgets need to be updated to support iOS 14, at the moment you can only view these widgets at the bottom of the today view, you can’t use them in widgets ok the Home Screen, nor can you move them higher up the today view. Please update them for iOS 14 😊

On previous versions of Home, it was simply the best app for fine tuned control of HomeKit accessories and scenes. You could select all the characteristics of all the accessories you wanted in one go, and then tweak within the scene itself.

Unfortunately this new update breaks that workflow, since every time you select a characteristic of an accessory to add to a scene, you’re taken back to the scene itself. The UX prioritises adding a single characteristic over multiple. Imagine you want to create a scene with 4 lights, and you want to control the power, brightness, saturation and hue in each; setting up this scene could be done in around 19 taps for 16 characteristics on the old version. On this latest update it takes 64 taps, which makes the app incredibly frustrating to use.

There are lots of good things about this app, but since it broke one of the main workflows to set up a scene I find myself looking for alternatives. I’d be massively appreciative if the scene creation UX could be fixed to something as good as, or better than, before.

After spending a small fortune kitting my house out with HomeKit gear, I was at my wits end... None of the rules or customisations were working as they should be... Until I found Home+ 4.

I’d tried the native iOS Home app (we all know how good that is... 🙄), the Eve Motion app, the Phillips Hue app, and Hesperus (which seems to have been abandoned by its developer). None of those alternatives seemed to work — rules would go missing, automations would never run, or integration with the HomeKit API was outdated.

The only method I was having any luck with was the Hue app, which would be fine if I only wanted to automate Hue bulbs — but I need to manage smart outlets, motion sensors, and remote controls too — many of which were not supported by Hue, which I gather runs it’s own automation rules side-by-side with HomeKit.

Home+ is easy to use, has a great looking UI, and most importantly, IT ACTUALLY WORKS! Thanks for such a great bit of software — you saved me from major buyer’s remorse over ever jumping in to the HomeKit ecosystem in the first place. This app is worth every penny.