Home Assistant

Review by eFreeware

If you already run Home Assistant on a device at home, this companion app is the piece that turns that setup into something you can reach from anywhere. It is the official app from the Open Home Foundation, and its job is simple to describe: it connects to your own Home Assistant instance and puts the controls, automations and notifications on your phone or tablet.

The appeal is not a catalog of gadgets sold by one company. Home Assistant is built around privacy, choice and sustainability, and the app inherits that stance: the platform runs locally in your home, and the data about how your house behaves stays there. For anyone who has been uneasy about how much of their daily routine lives on somebody else's servers, that framing is the main draw.

It is free, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, so there is nothing to buy inside the app itself. The install base is well past a million, and the average rating sits at 4.1 from a large pool of reviews, which is the kind of number I read as "widely used, with some rough edges for some people."

One app for a house full of brands

The core idea is that you stop juggling a separate app for every brand. The companion app is your window into the thousands of devices and services Home Assistant supports. Lights, thermostats, locks, cameras, speakers and sensors end up in one place rather than scattered across a dozen logins.

The compatibility list is genuinely long, and it is worth scanning it before you commit to anything. Philips Hue, Google Cast, Sonos, IKEA Tradfri and Apple HomeKit-compatible devices are among those the app can find and configure quickly, and the wider catalog runs from robot vacuums and TVs to solar inverters and printers. If your home is already a mix of ecosystems, that breadth is the point.

Discovery is meant to take the sting out of setup. Rather than hand-entering every device, the app looks for new hardware and walks you through a quick configuration. I would still expect the first pass to involve some fiddling, because a system that speaks to this many brands rarely behaves identically across all of them, but the direction of travel is clearly toward less manual work.

Automations that tie the house together

Where a single-brand app stops at remote control, this one is built around making devices react to each other. The examples the developer gives are the familiar ones: lights dimming when a movie starts, heating shutting off when nobody is home. The value is in combining products that were never designed to talk to one another.

Because the platform runs locally, those automations are tied to your own setup. The app also gives you a private view of past trends and averages, so you can look back at how your home has behaved without that history leaving the house. For anyone who likes to tune heating, lighting or energy use over time, that record is more useful than a live dashboard alone.

Hardware add-ons extend the reach further. Z-Wave, Zigbee, Matter, Thread and Bluetooth are all supported through add-ons, which means devices that never touch Wi-Fi can still be part of the same setup. That is a meaningful amount of flexibility for a system you assemble yourself.

Your phone becomes a sensor

The app does more than send commands. It can share your phone's location so that heating, security and other automations respond to whether you are actually there, and it can pass along sensors such as steps taken, battery level, connectivity and your next alarm. Those readings become triggers and conditions in the same automation engine as everything else.

Notifications are the other half of that. The app can tell you when it detects a leak or when a door has been left open, and you decide what it reports. That control matters, because a smart home that pings you about everything quickly becomes noise. Handled well, the alerts are the difference between a system you watch and one that watches for you.

There is also a local voice assistant you can text or talk to on your device. I would treat it as a convenience layer on top of the automations rather than the headline feature, but it fits the overall privacy-first design.

Widgets, the car and your wrist

Day-to-day use is spread across several surfaces. You can build your own widgets to control any device with a tap, which is a sensible way to keep the two or three things you touch most often within reach without opening the app. Android Auto support puts the same controls on your car's dash, so opening the garage or disarming the security system can happen from the driver's seat.

Wear OS is covered too, with notifications, sensors, tiles and watchface complications. On a watch, that mostly means glancing at a status or firing off a single action without pulling out a phone. None of these extras are essential to the core experience, but they show that the app is meant to live wherever you already are rather than only on the handset.

The combination is unusually broad for a companion app. Most smart home apps give you a phone screen and little else; this one treats the phone, the car and the watch as valid control points for the same system.

What you need before it does anything

The most important thing to understand is that this app is not a standalone product. It is the companion to a Home Assistant instance that you run yourself, on hardware such as Home Assistant Green or a Raspberry Pi. Without that instance, there is nothing for the app to connect to. That is not a flaw so much as the shape of the whole project, and it is the single fact that decides whether the app is relevant to you.

Remote access is the second piece. If you want to reach your home while you are away, the developer describes Home Assistant Cloud as the easiest and safest starting point. That is a billed claim rather than something I can verify, but it makes clear that getting remote access working is a step you have to think about.

The upside of that arrangement is that the system is yours: local execution, private data and a very wide choice of hardware. The cost is that you are the one assembling and maintaining it. Anyone expecting to install an app and have a smart home appear will be disappointed; anyone who wants to build one on their own terms is in the right place.

A fit for tinkerers and privacy-minded households

The clearest audience is people who already run Home Assistant or intend to. If you have a Green, a Pi or another always-on machine at home and a mix of devices from different brands, the app is the natural way to reach that setup from a phone. It rewards a willingness to configure things once so they behave the way you want afterward.

It also suits households that care about where their data lives. Running the platform locally and keeping trends and averages in the home is a deliberate alternative to handing your daily patterns to a vendor. If that principle matters to you, the app is consistent with it from the ground up.

For everyone else, the honest framing is that this is a companion, not a starter kit. It assumes a system that already exists or that you are prepared to build. The 4.1 average from a large user base suggests most people who take that step find it worthwhile, while leaving room for the usual friction of a self-hosted setup.

A companion worth having if you run the platform

Home Assistant's companion app does a lot for something that costs nothing and carries no ads or purchases. Remote control, automatic device discovery, cross-brand automations, phone sensors, notifications, widgets, Android Auto and Wear OS support add up to a genuinely complete remote for a self-hosted home. For an existing Home Assistant user, installing it is close to a default choice.

The conditions are worth repeating, because they define the fit. You need a Home Assistant instance running at home, and you need to sort out remote access if you want to control things from outside. Those requirements are the price of the privacy and flexibility the platform offers, and they are not small.

If you are already invested in this ecosystem, this is the app that makes it portable. If you are not, the app is a doorway to a project rather than a product in itself, and it is worth deciding which of those two you are before you install it.

What's new

Full release change log: https://github.com/home-assistant/android/releases/latest