Pilot — a native iOS & Apple Watch app for Home Assistant (evaluating demand)

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Hello Home Assistant Community,

I’ve been building Pilot, a native iOS and Apple Watch app for home automation, for about 10 years. It currently supports Domoticz and Jeedom, and I’m seriously considering adding Home Assistant support. Before I commit to building it, I want to make sure there’s genuine demand — and more importantly, understand what HA users would actually want from it.

What Pilot does differently

The Companion app is excellent and I’m not trying to replace it. It gives you your full HA dashboard on mobile, which is great for setup, automation editing, and power users who want complete control.

Pilot takes a narrower approach: a fully native iOS interface built around the 20 interactions you do every day. Lights, switches, blinds, climate, scenes. Fast, native, no webview. Deep Apple ecosystem integration — Apple Watch companion, home screen widgets, geofencing, Siri shortcuts, haptic feedback, etc.

Think of it as a complement to Companion rather than a replacement: Companion for configuration, Pilot for daily control.

What I’d genuinely love feedback on

  • Do you find Companion frustrating for daily use, or is it good enough that a native alternative isn’t worth paying for?
  • Which entity types do you interact with most on a typical day?
  • Is “native iOS feel” something you’d actually pay ~€15/year for, or is this a “must be free” category for you?

I’ve put a short waitlist page and 4-question survey together if you want to share more structured feedback: Pilot for Home Assistant — Native iOS & Apple Watch App

Happy to answer questions about what I’m planning. Honest feedback very welcome — including “Companion is fine, don’t bother” if that’s your genuine view.

Patrick

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Hi Patrick. Doing some marketing research too. Do you have plans for an Android version too, compatible with the Samsung watch ecosphere (and others)? Will I have to pay for this too?
Is it possible you could vibe something, based on your existing code?

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The current app is good enough for me. It already has an Apple Watch companion, Home screen widgets, haptic feedback and geofencing.

I’m not sure about Siri Shortcuts but I expose all my home assistant entities to HomeKit so Siri controls devices that way. Remember you are competing with not only the home assistant app but the Apple home app as well.

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I don’t know if this is within your envisaged scope, but something I’ve been trying and failing to achieve with existing software is to have my Apple Watch perform an extended (until acknowledged by the wearer) haptic alert, callable by an HA automation or script.

Use case: a silent alarm (so I don’t wake my partner) that HA automations can trigger based on some arbitrary set of events (eg. 30 minutes after sunrise, when the front door camera detects the postman, or 7am, whichever is earliest, armed on weekdays at 5am).

Personally I’d be okay paying a subscription if I knew there’s an ongoing infrastructure cost that would justify it, but would generally prefer a somewhat higher one-off purchase cost.