The Apple Home app may be our preferred way of interacting with our HomeKit accessories, but it certainly has its limitations. For those with a lot of devices, things can get crowded in a hurry and some automations that don't need temperatures, such as those for temperature, are lacking. Fortunately, however, there are applications for this! Here are some of our favorites that help grow our HomeKit game.

Home + 4

Apple's Apple app on iOS offers the basics of accessory and automation control, but it lacks the user's customization and user-friendly features. Fortunately, there is an application that can help you fill in the gaps if you need more accessories. Home + 4 allows you to choose from a variety of icons that can best match your accessories and allows you to create your own custom home screen in the app that includes your favorites.

A handy group view is also available, which can give you an overview of similar accessories, such as a door and window sensors with just a tap, without the need to switch rooms. Finally, Home + 4 gives you the power to create automations that are missing from the Home storage application, including temperature-based ones, that can flip on a fan if the temperature gets a little high.

HomeCam for HomeKit removes all clutter and provides quick and easy access to HomeKit camera workflows. This clean and focused app presents you with your cameras in a grid view at launch and also includes a car cycling mode that gives you a full screen view that rotates to the next room after a designated time.

HomeCam also includes options for placing live camera streams live in the widget portion of the iPhone and iPad. If that wasn't enough, you can even create shortcuts from Siri that can extract a stream of your camera using just your voice, and purchase prices include apps for Apple TV and Apple Watch.

While configuring HomeKit accessories isn't the most time-consuming thing in the world, things can add up quickly if you need to add them all at once. This is where the HomeKit Controller comes from. This fantastic app is the only one around you that can back up (through in-app purchase) your HomeKit home, ready to restore things in case of disaster.

The HomeKit Controller is also the only HomeKit application that supports recording the behind-the-scenes action. This feature, although limited to the foreground operation of the iOS device, will display in plain text every single thing that HomeKit accessories do. This means you can see when an accessory has been turned on and is constantly rolling with updates as it happens.

Wallflower for HomeKit is a beautifully designed HomeKit dashboard, suitable for wall-mounted iPads. A minimal, simple interface only displays the controls for the room in which it is running, along with an automatic passive sensor data update chart.

Even if it was designed with the iPad in mind, running on an iPhone still gives you the same view of your HomeKit home, making it perfect for an office companion. There are several themes, and bonus features include a large clock display, Wi-Fi access information for guests, and automatic darkening using the camera on your device.

Pushcut is a smart application that combines the power of push notifications and shortcuts from Siri with HomeKit to allow some truly unique ways to control your home. We've all been there at one point, one of those fancy automations that turns off the lights at one point of the day leaves you in the dark when you're not on your regular schedule.

With Pushcut, instead of an automatically running automation, you can set your iOS device to send you a push notification at a set time. So if you work late at the office, the lights won't go out with you yet. Alternatively, you can ignore the notification and continue doing things without interruption.

The HomeKit association codes, those little stickers with the QR code and the eight digits included with each accessory, seem to have an advantage in throwing you or losing you around the house. Unfortunately, these codes are crucial to the pairing process, and if you can't track it, you won't be able to add it back to the Home app.

HomePass for HomeKit aims to solve this problem by providing a place where you can store all your codes in one convenient application. Once you enter one of your codes, it is accessible from any iOS device, as well as from Apple Watch. Now you can pick up the code anytime, and Apple Watch can even display the QR code, allowing you to scan it with your phone.

The Home Dash app takes the HomeKit experience to the next level with customizable "dashboards" that you can use to replace the Home Vanity application. Sliding sliders and convenient controls look amazing on a wall-mounted iPad and give you the data you're most interested in.

HomeDash widgets can include different types of accessories, such as live camera views, door locks, light controls, and more. Widgets can display things like the battery status of all your accessories right on a screen.

As the name suggests, Wake Up Light is a unique HomeKit application that creates a sunrise simulated with your accessories. This simple application allows you to set the desired wake-up time for each day of the week, along with the speed at which your lights raise their brightness.

Once the time is set, Wake Up Light adds a few scenes and automations to the Home application with your new morning routine. This application works for all types of lighting, lamps, bulbs, switches; you call him.

Home Flash for HomeKit solves the age-old problem of getting the attention of everyone in your home without having to scream or travel from room to room. This simple app takes existing HomeKit lighting fixtures and combines them with a quick switch that can turn them on or off.

Needless to say, Home Flash is a great way to summon your kids to the dinner table or to announce someone is taking too little time in the shower. The lights around the house can also be set to different colors, which makes it even more useful.

The HomeScan app for HomeKit is one of those utilities that you can't use every day, but will come in handy at some point during your smart trip. This smart app scans Bluetooth signals in your home and displays their signal strength depending on your current location.

Simply choose an accessory you want to monitor on the iPhone version of the app and walk around the house while wearing the Apple Watch. The Watch app will display the power of the real-time signal of an accessory you are tracking, which is great for diagnosing a problematic connection or determining the best place for the latest equipment.

As with Wake Up Light and Home Flash, Neon for HomeKit is another application that keeps the focus on your lights. This excellent application can make your light bands and bulbs come to life through different color, intermittent and pulsing cycling patterns.

Neon can also use the iPhone and iPad microphones to listen to your songs, syncing your lights to the beat. This feature is especially useful if you have an always-on iOS device dedicated to HomeKit.

Streamie is another application dedicated to HomeKit that helps you keep an eye on everything in your home. Using a classic grid view, this app can display up to 16 cameras at a time, including those outside the HomeKit world. the RTSP protocol.

However, this app not only shows you the cameras, it can also pan, tilt and zoom your streams, and snapshots can be saved directly to a shared iCloud photo album. The app is free to try, confining you to just one room, but if that's all you have, then this is a great way to see how useful quick access to your feed can be.

What do you use?

What HomeKit apps do you use for your iOS devices? Do you know of a wonderful thing I missed? Tell us in the comments!

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