Solves one of the smart homes biggest hurdles.
Those who are into smart homes know one of the most annoying parts is finding the right room to control the light you want when opening the home app.
For those who have looked into how to solve this, you may have come across the madness of home assistant, where people would put a raspberry pi with a Bluetooth beacon in each room, which would measure how close/far your phone/watch was from each beacon to tell which room you are in. And even after all that work, you would still need to deal with, maintain, and build dashboards to display the correct lights in home assistant. A fun way to pass time for hobbyist, a good way to get divorced for the rest of us.
This solves the issue pretty easily after a small amount of setup. Walk around your rooms for 20 seconds to train the app to recognize which room is which- this is very clever, it uses Bluetooth to measure signal strength of other things in your home, like tvs and speakers, to tell which room you are in based on the strength of signal to these items. Best of all, it ties into your existing Apple home setup. I keep the widget on my phone at all times and it works great.
The lifetime license is a cherry on top!
For those who have looked into how to solve this, you may have come across the madness of home assistant, where people would put a raspberry pi with a Bluetooth beacon in each room, which would measure how close/far your phone/watch was from each beacon to tell which room you are in. And even after all that work, you would still need to deal with, maintain, and build dashboards to display the correct lights in home assistant. A fun way to pass time for hobbyist, a good way to get divorced for the rest of us.
This solves the issue pretty easily after a small amount of setup. Walk around your rooms for 20 seconds to train the app to recognize which room is which- this is very clever, it uses Bluetooth to measure signal strength of other things in your home, like tvs and speakers, to tell which room you are in based on the strength of signal to these items. Best of all, it ties into your existing Apple home setup. I keep the widget on my phone at all times and it works great.
The lifetime license is a cherry on top!
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Love the features—HATE the design
Room detection is such a compelling and powerful feature, made all the more attractive by the suite of Shortcut actions made available. It’s just a shame that as a result of questionable design choices, actually using the app itself becomes such an unappealing experience.
You cannot use anything in the app without it making you buy an app purchase
This app look very interesting and it has good reviews. I’m sure it could possibly be a good app but I don’t know. I haven’t had the opportunity to. I’ve set up the app and as soon as I try to do anything, ask me to go premium this is now including, changing the dimmer settings on the lights so I can’t even turn the light up and down on the phone which is one of its main functions if this was a truly free trial let’s say it was timed. You give a day or a week then I am pretty sure I would’ve brought this up because it seems very interesting but having this tactic of drawing you in saying it’s free and then every function being hidden behind a payroll is kind of disgusting.
Ps i’ve just come back to the app to check whether the review has gone live and it still hasn’t. I’m hoping the Apple is running a process through this to check the review for rude words of which they will find and then will put the review up live I will be checking in on this on a regular basis if I don’t see it live within a week I will be ringing Apple up to make a complaint, even on top of all that I don’t see why my one star shouldn’t count straight away as you don’t need to check the one star for anything I will be checking back. I will be making sure this review goes up.
Ps i’ve just come back to the app to check whether the review has gone live and it still hasn’t. I’m hoping the Apple is running a process through this to check the review for rude words of which they will find and then will put the review up live I will be checking in on this on a regular basis if I don’t see it live within a week I will be ringing Apple up to make a complaint, even on top of all that I don’t see why my one star shouldn’t count straight away as you don’t need to check the one star for anything I will be checking back. I will be making sure this review goes up.
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Response from developer
Hi, Thank you for taking the time to review HomeLights. I understand your concerns about the limitations of the free version and appreciate your feedback. The free version allows you to fully control two rooms of your choice. For users with larger setups, upgrading to the full version is necessary to unlock all rooms and access premium features, such as Room Detection. HomeLights also offers a 14-day free trial, specifically designed to give users the opportunity to try out the full version without spending any money. I'm always looking for ways to enhance the user experience in both versions of the app. If you have any suggestions or further feedback, I'd love to hear them. Feel free to email me through the app to discuss more about this. Thank you again for your feedback, and I hope you'll give HomeLights another chance in the future! Best, Anthonin
Solves Light Management Elegantly
The room guessing is very useful and up to this point has been fairly accurate for me.
Definitely worth the investment!
Definitely worth the investment!
Simply Awesome!
Just downloaded.. this is fantastic! It solves my frustrations with controlling my HomeKit lights via traditional methods. Super simple and clean.. love it!
Awesome
I'm loving it
Slick app, great added features
Usually the auxiliary apps to HomeKit offer little functionality beyond the native app itself. The auto detection feature and live widgets in this app, however, are game changers. I’d be willing to bet it gets shut down in the near future—once Apple buys the developers out in a bid to include the auto detect features in the native Home app itself.
Great app in a slick package that works well and is worth the money spent.
Great app in a slick package that works well and is worth the money spent.
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Awesome
I'm loving it
First impressions
Just amazing app, love the idea and the room control layout, I will use some old iPhone devices as light switches.
Huge improvement over home app
Hated setting all the lights individually in that native home app. This is way better and faster and the dev updates regularly. Probably my most used app. Thanks!
