Over the years this thing has spilled a lot and I've stayed away. Battery life was abysmal and response times were quite laggy. They seem to have taken this feedback to heart and I have nothing but praise! Installation is done exclusively through HomeKit, so you don't need another app. A firmware update starts within minutes of installation, which the thread allows. Once on the wire network (checked with the Eve app) the battery life has not increased in 2 days and the response times are around 500ms (which is the same as controlling things via HomeKit for me). To be fair, you could watch the battery drain before the firmware update, which was crazy - not sure if it's a calibration thing with the battery naturally draining in storage, or the Bluetooth setup that it really chews but stays at 75%. Probably a combination of both, but on the latest firmware (3.1 at the time of writing) things seem perfectly stable. What I haven't heard people mention but what I think is really clever is the mounting plate. It comes with a fairly thick faceplate, but I noticed that the remote itself is the same size as a typical paddle switch. You can actually detach the center mounting plate (which has a magnet to hold the remote) and **mount it in a standard 1-gang outlet box!** You can replace a switch with this - just connect the wires, use a paddle style switch plate and this thing looks stock. What's more, by using shortcuts, you can use the buttons to toggle the lights instead of needing an on button and an off button. This is a smart little clutch switch! In closing, if you've previously turned off the Wemo Stage controller, either because of a bad experience with it or terrible feedback, I encourage you to give it another try. I give it 5/5.