Hi!
Few years ago I bought old iPad 1 for $8 with an idea to convert it into cheap Home Assistant dashboard. Quickly, I figured out that it does not support any recent TLS ciphers and WebSockets are also very sketchy.
Few weeks ago I finally found some time and created this:
MQTT based, state driven iPad dashboard
- App: Objective‑C (UIKit, iOS 5 APIs) for legacy iPads
- Transport: MQTT 3.1.1 over TCP (no TLS/WebSockets)
- Design: Retained per‑device config + retained mirrored states; stateless JSON commands per widget
I only have iPad 1 (iOS 5.1.1) but application is compiled to support all iPads with iOS 5.1 - iOS 12.9. Idea behind this was to support all iPads that official Companion app does not support anymore (min iOS 15)
There’s quite a bit of documentation in github repo as well as template for Issues. I would be very glad if someone finds time to test is and provide some feedback or potential features to implement.
iOS installation side is not super frinedly yet - in short, you need to have jailbroken device, know how to install .app via SSH or locally hosted Cydia repo.
Cheers and enjoy!