uPnP Mate vs HomeWatch
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
uPnP Mate
This utility app helps you discover and analyze Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices on your local network. It provides detailed information about their IP addresses, capabilities, and extensions, allowing you to interact with their interfaces and examine network communication.
- Discover UPnP devices on your network
- View IP addresses and capabilities
- Examine device limitations and extensions
- Interact with device presentation interfaces
- Analyze UPnP discovery messages
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Discover all the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) devices on your local area network. Find out their IP addresses, capabilities and limitations, optional features and extensions. Interact with devices via their presentation user interfaces. Examine discovery messages that are exchanged between devices and the UPnP controller. uPnP Mate is compatible with devices that conform to the UPnP Device Architecture V1.0 specification.
HomeWatch
Monitor and control your HomeKit devices with a glanceable status display. This app offers customizable views for rooms, scenes, and individual devices across Apple platforms, including widgets and menu bar items.
- Glanceable room status with color-coded indicators
- Control scenes and devices within rooms
- View camera feeds, weather, and website content
- Customizable home and lock-screen widgets
- Menu bar items for Mac with real-time updates
- Extensive interface customization options
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I made an app for my Apple Watch to see a glanceable status of our home and to control our HomeKit devices. It worked so well on the watch, that I expanded it to a dashboard app for all our Apple devices. I have now added a configuration interface to make it compatible with any HomeKit enabled home setup. I hope some of you will find it useful. HOME VIEW The circle / grid with icons on the home view shows a color coded status of the rooms of the home: red when a door is open, yellow when a window is open, orange when the heating is on, cyan when lights are on and green when nothing is on. On the iPhone, iPad, tvOS and Mac the app also shows the time, date, cameras, feeds, events, reminders, a website and weather information. When there is rain, it will show a rain graph. ROOM VIEWS When a room is selected, the circle layout will show the scenes you can control in that room. The grid layout also shows the devices that can be controlled in that room. Additionally the room view has an information section. To the right it can show any characteristics from your devices. Below is a detail view that can show a camera view, a website, a temperature, humidity and climate history graphs. WIDGETS Fully customisable lock-screen and home-screen widgets. Tap / Clicking a widget item to go directly to a room view, execute a scene or launch any url-scheme. Customisable complications on the Watch can have actions to go directly to a room view and execute any scene. MENU BAR ITEMS On the Mac any HomeKit characteristic can be added to the menu bar and is kept up to date. CUSTOMISATION The interface can be fully customised. The user can add their own background images and icons from the photo library. Customise gradient overlays, icons, fonts, colours and more. Make it your own…
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: HomeWatch at 4.8 against uPnP Mate's 3.9. HomeWatch also leads on ads (none vs shown) and update cadence (every 2 months vs every 5 months). uPnP Mate's advantage is iOS requirement (12.0 vs 15.6). On price, review sentiment, ratings volume and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
HomeWatch holds the better App Store score, 4.8 against 3.9. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 7 and 4 respectively. Written reviews complicate that: 67% of uPnP Mate's written reviews are positive against 60% of HomeWatch's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
uPnP Mate ships an update every 5 months, HomeWatch every 2 months. The most recent releases landed on June 1, 2026 and July 7, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | uPnP Mate | HomeWatch |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 3.9 (7 ratings) | 4.8 (4 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 66.7% of reviews — better | 60.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 7 — better | 4 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 months | Every 2 months — better |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Ad-supported | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch — better |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 15.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 5 MB | 64 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Yuk-Lun Wong | Peter Vogels |
Customer experience
uPnP Mate
HomeWatch
In-app purchases
uPnP Mate
No in-app purchases
HomeWatch
No in-app purchases
