Home Remote vs HomeWatch
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Home Remote
Consolidate control of your smart home devices with a single, feature-rich application. Automate actions with schedules, location triggers, and voice commands. Supports a wide range of popular smart home brands and protocols.
- Unified smart home control
- Schedules and geofencing
- Voice recognition support
- Native support for popular brands
- URL calls and TCP/UDP packets
- Location triggering with beacons
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Tired of all the different apps you need to control your smart home? Are they missing features you’d like to see such as schedules, geofencing or Today Screen access? Then Home Remote is for you. With native support for Milight, LimitlessLED, EasyBulb, LIFX, Belkin WeMo, Indigo, along with URL calls and TCP/UDP packets, there isn’t much that Home Remote can’t control. You can add attributes to any action, such as location triggering with beacons or geofences, schedules, even voice recognition. Home Remote - Great for any smart home with Home Automation. Sunrise and sunset times are provided by http://sunrise-sunset.org
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 price: HomeWatch at Free against Home Remote's $1.99. HomeWatch also leads on device support (6 vs 4). Home Remote's advantage is review sentiment (82% vs 60%) and ratings volume (25 vs 4). On rating, update cadence, ads 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
HomeWatch is free to download; Home Remote costs $1.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.8 for Home Remote against 4.8 for HomeWatch. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Home Remote has 25 ratings behind it against 4, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 82% of Home Remote's written reviews are positive against 60% of HomeWatch's.
Home Remote ships an update monthly, HomeWatch every 2 months. The most recent releases landed on September 6, 2026 and July 7, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Home Remote | HomeWatch |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1.99 | Free — better |
| Rating | 4.8 (25 ratings) — better | 4.8 (4 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 82.4% of reviews — better | 60.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 25 — better | 4 |
| Update frequency | Monthly — better | Every 2 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Apple TV | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac, Apple TV, Apple Watch — better |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 15.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 30 MB | 64 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Bouncing Ball Games | Peter Vogels |
Customer experience
Home Remote
HomeWatch
Bugs and requests
Home Remote
Reported bugs
13 issues- App crashes after iOS updates
- Geofencing stopped working after iOS 12
- MiLight compatibility broken in recent versions
- Brightness settings not working with older bridges
- Preset corruption when editing multiple actions
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- Apple Watch app crashes frequently
- Widget disappears from notification center
- Unable to send data via POST/PUT methods
- External URLs not working on iPhone (works on iPad)
- Light automatically turns off after Apple Watch commands
- Device status not displayed/updated
- Inconsistent command execution
- App unresponsive with too many voice controls
Requested features
20 requests- HomeKit and Siri integration
- Google Home integration
- Toggle buttons with visual status indicators
- Brightness slider in color picker
- Support for newer MiLight bridge versions (v6, iBox 2)
Show 15 moreShow fewer
- Ability to control multiple zones simultaneously
- Buttons accessible from Apple Watch glances
- Feedback confirmation for executed actions
- Cellular data support (3G/4G)
- Logitech Harmony integration
- FHEM support
- Image-based buttons instead of text
- Batch IP address updates
- POST/PUT method support
- French language voice recognition
- Italian language support
- Customizable widget appearance (size, color, shape)
- Action grouping/categorization
- Brightness percentage input for white light
- Smooth color transitions
HomeWatch
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Home Remote
No in-app purchases
HomeWatch
No in-app purchases
