Home+ 6

After the crazy 12 month building a house for my family, I was finally able to work on my apps again. The result is the new version 6 of Home+. This updates includes the new widget types and a nice feature for Eve devices.

Let’s take a look.

Widgets

Widgets always were an essential part of Home+ to control accessories without opening the app. Back in iOS 8 (2015) widgets were displayed in the Today View.

All was fine until Apple introduced Home Screen widgets in iOS 14 and removed support for widgets in the Today View. The new widgets work differently as they do not run continuously but instead are launched by the system in the background and then get paused. This means that a widget cannot reliably show the current state of an accessory. After the widget is paused, the accessory might be updated – for example the light is turned on. This is why the new Home+ widget do not show the state of an accessory. It wouldn’t work reliably.

This limitation also determines which types of widgets make sense. A widget that shows the camera stream just doesn’t work. A widget that shows a sensor value (for example of a contact sensor) doesn’t work. As long as the technical limitations on iOS are not fixed, Home+ can only offer one type of accessory widget.

The accessory widget supports two types of action. It can either show the details of the accessory in the app or toggle the current state. In both cases the app is launched when the widget is tapped. (Remember, widgets do not run by itself.)

Oh, and there is also a scene widget which runs a scene when tapped.

(In iOS 16 widgets also available for the Lock Screen.)

Charts

The second big feature of this release is charts for Eve devices. I’m sure you already know that Eve devices store measurements (like temperature, humidity…) internally. Those measurement are visible in charts in the iOS Eve app.

The same data is now downloaded by Home+ and shown in charts in the detail screen of the accessory.

I hope you all like the new features and enjoy using Home+. The update is free to existing users. Download it from the App Store.