HomeGuard Pro 4+

This app should be great (in fact it is for setting up the system) but, and it is a HUGE but, it has a massive flaw on iPhones.

The disarm/arm/home buttons on an iPhone should not be at the bottom of the screen. If you have an iPhone from the past few years with no home button, to return to the home page you have to swipe up from the bottom to the phone. It is way to easy to catch one of the HomeGuard Pro’s buttons whilst doing this and I am forever either setting the alarm when I am actually in the house or turning the alarm off when I am away from home and I have just been checking in on the system. Not ideal... Please consider changing this!

The alarm system itself is OK albeit a bit temperamental with stuck sensors now and again, but it is let down by the app (IOS). The app is not optimised for an iPad screen, but the main issue is with the logging and alerting of sensors. Because of the aforementioned quirk with sensors thinking they are still open, I often get a rather unhelpful push or text message stating that a one or more sensors is not closed. WHICH ONE? If you arm it using a mobile device via the app, the app pops up a message with the exact sensor and asks you to acknowledge it, so the system and the app knows exactly what sensor is stuck. So with this information, why isn’t this logged somewhere, or pushed through with the alert I get if armed via the keypad or a remote? The detail is in there, so why not use it? It’s kind of really important information to be given otherwise you have to walk around the property checking and resetting every single sensor. A lot more thought needs to be put into the features of the app making full use of the data received from the main control unit.

The alarm system is great, none too different from the Yale I tried, although the hardware is slightly higher spec.

What let’s this (and Yale’s) app down is that you can’t set different zones and have different wait times before the system triggers.

For example, I’m using this for my home office in the garden and also for the house. If we’re not in the office, we part set the alarm. This sets in ‘Home Arm’ and it is set on a timer so if you walk into the office you have 15 seconds to get to the keypad to set the alarm. However, when you put the app on ‘Arm’ (which sets the whole house and garden office) you can’t have a timer. This means that I can’t put sensors on the door or PIR’s in the hallway as I walk into the main house because it triggers IMMEDIATELY.

It would be really desirable to have the simple functionality of a timer setting on both home and full arm settings OR to be able to set multiple zones around the house tailored to our needs. This should be simple enough with a firmware upgrade. Shouldn’t it?