You probably control smart lights around your home with the stock Apple Home app and Siri. But the new app HomeLights for HomeKit is a tailor-made way to bring even easier control of lighting.
One of the top features of the app is its unified control system. You can control the brightness, color, and temperature of every bulb in a single room at once. That’s not possible with the Home app.
Another great feature is smart room detection. Tapping Bluetooth, the app will pinpoint your location and bring up the remote for that specific room.
And there’s no need to open up the app to control lights. The home screen widget will display your current room using the Smart Room Detection feature. There are also a number of lock screen widgets to choose from.
When away from your iPhone or iPad, you can also access HomeLights on the Apple Watch. Tap the screen or use the Digital Crown to adjust the brightness of a room.
The app also offers a number of ways to build Shortcuts. That allows you to incorporate different actions from the app into your lighting automations. For example, you can use “Get current room” action to build a location aware shortcut. To take full advantage of the location awareness, just use the app’s “AirPlay to nearest speaker” shortcut.
HomeLights is a free download on the App Store now. It’s for the iPhone and all iPad models.
The free version of the app allows you to control two selected rooms.
There is also a premium version available for $0.99 per month or $11.90 for a lifetime license. With the premium version, you can control unlimited rooms, access the Smart Room detection feature, and access the app on the Apple Watch.
