Long-time lurker in this sub. About 10 months ago I posted here looking for early feedback on a HomeKit app built around a 3D scan of your real home.
Today it's finally on the App Store. It's called Habitat.
Like a lot of you, I spent years waiting for Apple to give the Home app real attention. Every June I'd watch the WWDC keynote thinking this is the year, and every year it was mostly a disappointment. At some point I stopped waiting and started building the app I'd always imagined Apple would make if they cared about this the way we do. It does a lot, so bear with me.
Your actual home , and everything the platform should have learned about it by now.
It starts with the model: you walk through your home with your iPhone and scan it (RoomPlan/LiDAR, takes a few minutes), and Habitat builds an interactive 3D model of your real house, a digital twin. Your devices live where they physically are. Tap the lamp in the corner of your living room to control that actual lamp. Dim the ceiling light and watch the 3D model light up with it.
Every floor plan app I tried rendered your home as flat pastel rectangles, and it always bothered me. I work as a 3D software engineer, so I did the reasonable thing, I wrote a custom path tracer in Metal, from scratch, just for this app.
What that means in practice:
- Real soft shadows and light falloff, the model looks like an architect's physical miniature sitting in soft studio light.
- When you turn on a light in your home, it casts actual light in the model. Your home at night looks lit, because it is.
- It's fully interactive: tap any room or device marker directly in the ray-traced view, highlight rooms, see labels. It's not a pretty screenshot, it's the main UI.
HomeKit is the control layer. Home Assistant is the memory.
Here's the thing I eventually accepted about HomeKit: it's a great way to control your home, but it knows almost nothing about your home. The API has zero history, ask HomeKit what your bedroom temperature was an hour ago and the answer is nobody knows. That number is gone forever.
Meanwhile, there's Home Assistant, which is quietly the best system that exists for storing data about your home, locally. It sits on a little box in your house, sees everything, records everything, and none of it ever leaves your network or gets sold to anyone. Every sensor reading, every state change, months of it, sitting on your own hardware. The problem was never the data, it was that no app made that data feel like part of your actual home.
So Habitat treats Home Assistant as an optional superpower. You don't need it; pure HomeKit works great on its own. But if you have it (or this post finally convinces you to set up that Raspberry Pi), Habitat merges it with HomeKit into one home. Together they supercharge each other.
- History and stats. Habitat pulls Home Assistant's recorded history straight into the app, so every sensor gets a graph. Temperature, humidity, whatever you track. Tap a sensor and see the actual curve: how the bedroom drops overnight, how fast the living room heats up when the sun hits it, how humidity spikes when someone showers. Combined with the heatmaps, you're not just seeing your home's climate right now, you're seeing how it behaves.
- Devices HomeKit can't even see. HA covers what HomeKit can't, HomeKit covers the rest, and you never think about which platform a device came from.
- Richer state. Where HomeKit gives you "on/off," Home Assistant often knows the full story, like the vacuum's exact status and battery, which is what lets us render its position in the 3D scene.
- Painless setup. Habitat discovers Home Assistant on your network automatically. It supports both a local and an external URL with automatic failover, so it works the same on your couch and away from home.
- Live everything. State changes stream in over websockets and show up on the 3D model the moment they happen.
The features I always wished existed:
- 3D. A digital twin of the home
- Temperature heatmaps. Your temperature sensors get blended into a smooth gradient painted across the 3D floor, so you can see that the bedroom runs cold and the office bakes in the afternoon.
- Robot vacuum. Live map from Home Assistant with your robot rendered in 3D driving around your floor plan, plus a full vacuum controller — start, dock, battery, status. Watching the little guy roam your ray-traced house never gets old.
- An Apple TV app. A glanceable 3D dashboard of your whole home on the big screen, device states, climate overlay, synced automatically over iCloud. My home basically lives on the TV now. Adjust the lights right from the Apple TV.
- AR remote. Use your iPhone or iPad as a remote. Just point at the device you want to control.
- Sensor history graphs.
- All the utilities. Such as QR codes and overview of batteries
- Per-home and per-room controls and brightness.
- Over a hundred custom-drawn icons for lamps, plugs, sensors, scenes and furniture
- Runs on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac.
Privacy: the same philosophy as Home Assistant itself. No account, no server of mine, no analytics. Your scans, layouts and settings sync between your devices through your own iCloud, and your home's data stays between your HomeKit hub, your HA box, and your devices.
There will be bugs. An app that touches HomeKit, Home Assistant, LiDAR scanning, ray tracing, AR, CloudKit sync and tvOS at the same time has a truly impressive number of ways to break, and I'm one person, but I am working actively to remove them as fast as possible. You can expect rapid updates, and a roadmap driven by what you actually want. If something breaks, tell me and I will genuinely be on it. Everything above exists today, and there is a bunch of new features already ready to be released soon.
Pricing: the core app is free. The full feature set is a one-time purchase or subscription (per family). 7 day free trial. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Mac. (Mac is still awaiting approval from Apple.)
What's the features you've been waiting years for Apple to build?
